Coda
by Scarabbug
Summary: ..."I had to arm the last weapon, I had to point it at the last remaining target, and then I had to help it make the choice, and for that, I needed a soul." The Finale of the Ace Lightning Roleplay. 2005 to 2007. Rating upped.
1. Flashback

"**Two worlds, one reality and two years to save the fictional." **

**Phew. **

**It's taken three years, countless roleplay scenarios and a seen month gap where absolutely nothing happened, but it looks as if we're here. **

**This story will be the finale of the Ace Lightning Roleplay which took place on live journal between the years of 2005-2007. It will include some portions written by Sarah frost, and I have attempted to keep this tale as coherent and in keeping with all the role-players desires as possible. **

**Obviously, people who were not involved in the roleplay may not have a clue what is going on, but I will try my best to keep the story coherent and understandable anyway, so you can probably follow along. Standard disclaimers apply. Certain original characters are the property of various role-players and will be credited as such when they appear.

* * *

**

"_I had to arm the last weapon, I had to point it at the last remaining target, and then, I had to help it make the choice. And for that, I needed a soul."_

- Jennifer Diane Reiss.

Coda.

_**Interlude. One. **_

**Location**: Hollander Household.

**Date**: ...

_He was sure the ghosts hadn't been there the last time he came through this level, but they were definitely there now. _

Ghosts_. Sort of, anyway. It was the only word he could think of to describe the creatures forming on the screen. They were wandering in and out of the walls: shadows of what looked like Lord Fear and Lady Illusion, flickering on the monitor for a few seconds before vanishing. The speakers even gave him the standard cackling sound-effects whenever they appeared, so Mark was sure he wasn't just imagining them. _

_He hadn't been playing for _that_ long. Not quite. _

_Still, it was creepy, and Mark knew what it probably meant. Lord Fear wouldn't have started appearing so much if Mark wasn't close to completing the game. _

_It had taken him two whole hours to get down to the 8__th__ Level of the Nevershine Mines. He would've made it through faster, if he hadn't kept trying to follow the ghosts (they could've been hidden bonus points or something; this game had things like that hidden everywhere). _

_This was his thirteenth attempt. Or maybe fourteenth, who could keep it all straight? _

'Knew I should've taken the right hand path…'

_He'd always hated bonus rounds, and in this game you had to do them every time you passed through their level. There was no getting out until you'd beaten them. People had probably wasted _weeks_ of their lives on the _Nevershine Mines Bonus Level (Route Eight).

'There should be a pathway here, it's in the… Oh… yeah. The right hand path again. For god's sakes, it's even written in the rulebook why didn't you _take_ it?'

_Getting through the bonus-tunnel the once, for example, wasn't enough for this game. Oh no. In this game you had to go back through it every time you wanted to reach one of only three level save points (which you _had_ to do if you didn't want to risk losing a whole zone's worth of accessory build-ups. Seriously not worth it before you went to take on "_The Master of the House_.")_

"The Master of the House_" had to be nearby, Mark thought, remembering the name from a cut scene. What had it been that the Lightning Knight instructor had said to Mark's character before he started level one? "_Evils, young knight, every one of them within that carnival. They're a cowardly lot, but their Lord of the House has only Fear in his heart."

"But… won't that make him easier to defeat, sir? With _our_ training?'

"Not in the least. You'll understand when you meet him_."_

_Yeah. Mark was starting to understand what that cut-scene was supposed to mean._

"Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom_" (according to Pete, anyway) was counted fifth of the top twenty list of the most difficult Platformer/RPG Computer Games available on the PC this year. There was a reason for that. That reason was probably the _Nevershine Mines

_And Mark _knows_ the book didn't say anything about there being ghosts down there… He's really not sure what that's about. _

_Lady Illusion liked to pop up randomly in the bonus levels anyway –those strange ghosts of her would drift through the walls with the occasional hollow laughter– but that was just the bonus levels. They'd _always_ been there. Now Lord Fear was popping up, too. _Both_ of them were, all over the place. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, always laughing and smiling. It was probably just the game trying to throw him off balance, but it still creeped him out a little. _

'Get a grip, Mark. It's just a game.'

_He knew where the real (sort of) Lady Illusion was, anyway –hiding in the Mystery Maze in the middle of the Gardens of Illusion that surrounded the Haunted House. He just couldn't get to her because the route kept changing and wouldn't stop until he worked out the level's puzzle. After a while he'd gotten fed up of dying all the time because he had to walk back into the Spider Nests he hadn't wanted to enter in the first place. _

_He actually almost felt relieved when the normal bad guys started showing up. _

_The fight was probably supposed to be important, since it offered a small cut scene before throwing "Ace" into another battle but at least it was better than the spiders. Who cared if Pigface and Dirty Rat weren't supposed to show up in this part of Nevershine? Mark actually almost smiled as the inventory switched to battle mode. Just Pigface and the Rat –he'd faced them in practically every level since he'd started the game. They were nothing new. Nothing to get too worked up about… almost a nice distraction from the spiders. _

'You're gonna fry, Pigface…'

_Pigface _did_ fry –with a lot of squealing and belching noises. Mark opted for the wrist cannons seeing as he was in a hurry, so no time for using any fancy combos. The rat vanished with a gibbering howl. Pigface vanished altogether and the on-screen Ace made a comment about smelling bacon and then… _

…_Then Anvil came out of nowhere. _

_They didn't announce him with a cut scene but Mark didn't have time to proclaim the unfairness of that (since when had this game been _fair_ anyway?) before Anvil starting beating the onscreen Ace over the head and bringing down his power levels by roughly twenty percent with every hit –too powerful, too fast. Mark didn't have time to activate his shield and no combos worked while you were _being_ attacked. _

'Wait, what the… oh, _damn_ it.'

_He'd been so close, the next cut scene had actually looked like it was going to start playing before Mark realised it was just another "_GAME OVER_" screen. He let his shoulders slump a little, trying not to feel as disappointed as he was. _Two whole hours_… He probably should've been unpacking some more or something, in all that time. _

_Then over Mark's shoulder, something tutted. _

'_Ouch. Looks like that was a tough break, kid.' _

_It took Mark a couple of seconds, first to work out who it was that was speaking, and then to turn around and face them. Ace was stood there with his arms folded, gazing at the screen the same way he sometimes looked at Sparx after a battle gone wrong. _

_A nervous feeling tugged at Mark's stomach. He couldn't work out why. _

'_I'm glad I'm not him. Well…' Ace shrugged in a way Mark could only describe as sheepish. Or self-conscious. It wasn't an expression that worked on Ace, who hadn't been designed for either of those things. 'You know what I mean.' _

_Mark's mouth opened. He meant to say "no", but no sound came out._

'_You should've used your fire booster, kid. That would've gotten rid of him. Or that's what I would've done, anyway. And your choice of power-levelling here?' He pointed at the screen over Mark's shoulder. 'It's totally wrong –I can tell. You know, you really shouldn't go into the Haunted House with anything less than a full powered shield… _Or_ the Garden of Illusion, for that matter. You can afford to sacrifice some of those attack points in exchange for more shielding. I'm surprised you even got this far without another level on the Shield of Justice.' _

'_I…' Mark started to speak, but his voice trailed off with a strange sort of squeaking noise. At least, he thought, he was able to make a sound now, even if he still didn't have a clue what to _say_ because… _

_Because this was _Ace Lightning_, sitting on his bed. Which in retrospect wasn't all that weird, these days, but Ace really shouldn't have been there and… _

_And… _

_Wait. No. That didn't make _sense_… _

'_Um… thanks?' _

'_Don't mention it, kid. You'll get there. A true Lightning Knight never gives up.' _

'_Ace?' _

'_That's the name, kid.' _

_Mark stood up, letting the joystick drop to the floor. Behind, the game chirped its usual "try again?" message a lot louder than Mark thought he'd had the speakers turned up. He ignored it. Ace didn't look at him; he just kept staring out of the window. The look on his face reminded Mark of his dad whenever he was about to get grounded. _

_But this Ace didn't even _exist_ yet, he couldn't… _

_Mark screwed up his eyes and expected that when he opened them, Ace would have disappeared, but he hadn't. He was now staring out of the window through a gap in the curtains which Mark could've sworn had been replaced by blinds months ago. Mark then realised that his room was blue, when it should have been red after his mother's last failed attempt at decorating and… _

_A spark of recognition fired in Mark's brain and suddenly, things all made sense. Of course. _

_This was a dream. A dream about the night of the lightning bolt, wasn't it? _

'_It's me, kid. Don't worry,' Ace said, and… Mark didn't know why that made him feel better, but it _did_, and he wasn't going to complain about anything that lessened the pounding in his chest. He sat down again. _

_How long? It was still a while away. Mark could hear the beginning of rainfall, but there was no thunder or lightning outside. No wind, yet. It wasn't late enough and the world outside the window wasn't totally dark. _

_Over a whole hour before Ace was meant to appear for the first time and battle Lord Fear in the Hollander's new garden… _

_Ace was now sitting on the bed again, staring distastefully at the superhero comic (Mark couldn't read the text to make out which comic it was) that'd been left there. His old heroic posture was still there. Even when Ace was just sitting there and staring at a comic book, it was kind of like watching the hero of the comic reading about himself. _

_Which was a weird thought. Or weirder than things already were. _

'_Ace I… okay, this doesn't make…' _

'_Doesn't make?' Ace's voice asked a question. _

_Mark tried to make a sentence and eventually found one that sounded right. (Probably because he had asked Ace exactly the same thing on more occasions than he liked to count). 'What are you _doing_ here?' _

'_Just stopping by, Marcus. Mark… sorry, Mark,' Ace corrected himself, wearing that weird, sheepish expression again. 'Is that a problem? At least I didn't break the window, right?' _

'…_Right,' Mark thought. Ace was always breaking things. Especially windows. But the window now was complete and un-cracked and seemed to be closed shut. Mark realised he had no idea how Ace had even got into the room. _

_But… no. This was wrong. It was all mixed up. His bedroom couldn't be blue and red. Ace couldn't be here yet but not created yet… _

'_Well, your agility ratings looked pretty good anyway, kid,' Ace said, suddenly, as if he was worried he might've upset his future (current? Whatever) sidekick and was trying to cheer him up. 'And your experience level. Almost good enough. They'll be easily high enough by the time you get there. You'd better pay attention – the "game over" screen just changed.'_

_Mark looked. Then his hand lifted the joystick from the floor before he could stop himself. _

_He figured it was probably instinct, or something. If there was one thing Mark knew he knew (no matter when this really was) it was games. _

_Anyway, a controller and the videogame-screen Ace felt like something he could be sure of right now. It was pretty much all he could remember about…_

_About… _

'_You okay kid? That game's not gonna play itself, you know.' _

_Mark told himself he wasn't freaking out and didn't quite manage to believe it. He pressed the "continue yes" option, because he felt like it was the only thing he could do. _

_Ace watched._

_The scene faded to black, then back into full colour and the ugly blues and greens –was it just him, or was there too much green in this game?– of the Nevershine Mines. _

'My Lord?_' A familiar voice came out tinny through the speakers. _

'…_It's… this is a cut-scene,' Mark felt the bizarre need to explain something that Ace probably already knew. 'It's just… you know. Bits of story told between the game play. I've seen this one before, so I could skip it if you want, I mean…' _

'_No problem, kid, Just… I'll watch it.' Mark supposed Ace was using that super-enhanced vision of his (he thought Ace had that, anyway) because he didn't move from where he was, just turned around to face the screen. _

'My Lord, are you sure of this direction? The Spiders_…'_

'Will obey you, if you force them. And of course I'm sure,' _the voice spat back impatiently. The videogame figure of Lord Fear limped even more obviously than he did in the real world. They had tried to make the shadow movements realistic on the walls and they shifted and curved as the villain moved. _'There is but a single tunnel. And only a fool would enter the Nevershine if he were not certain of the way. Let us hope Lightning is fool enough to follow us.'

'All the same, My Lord, we must hurry_…' _

_The figures on screen paused for a moment, standing still amongst the moving shadows. Lady Illusion's face was still strangely beautiful, even when rendered in pixels on a screen '_Why? Do you think I fear the Lightning Knight? One pathetic do-gooder against the many denizens of my cause?_' _

_One bony, pixilated finger brushed across the Lady's cheek. Mark glanced upwards at Ace, watching for a twitch, or shudder or some other expression of revulsion but none came. Ace continued to gaze the screen the same way he had stared at nothing, that time one of Chuck's viruses had infected him and frozen his entire system. Mark tried not to shiver. '_You are wrong my lady, I have no need to fear the Knights. What is there to fear_…'_

'But Fear himself_,' Lady Illusion finished with an understanding, yet slightly irritated sigh. Now that Mark looked at her more closely he could see just how strange and rehearsed her behaviour seemed to be. '_Of course, my Lord. But—'

'Yes,_' Lord Fear cut in, his figure hobbling on across the screen '_Your own fear is understandable, but I would not have obtained your services were it not for your cunning, my Lady. Use it well and he shall not triumph._' The way Fear said this made it feel more like an order than a compliment. '_The battle beyond these walls shall distract them long enough to permit us our escape. Come_.'_

_Lord Fear and Lady Illusion finished their conversation, and then they faded out into the pixel darkness together. _

_Mark remembered Fear's bony, skinless fingertip digging into his own neck once, sharp and real where they shouldn't have been, even though none of that had happened yet and… _

_He wondered if Ace was feeling just as confused. _

'_Ace…?' _

'_No, kid, I don't get it,' Ace answered the question Mark had wanted to ask, but didn't quite know how. Ace had moved a few steps closer to him, but still continued to stare at the screen. 'I don't know where they're going anymore than you do. But then again, I wasn't there. I guess that's how the game was made. The person playing gets to see everything.'_

_Mark swallowed, not really understanding what Ace meant. 'What… what are they talking about there? That bit about a battle?'_

'_Do you remember what Sparx told you about what happened in Magery City after I left to come here?' Ace asked. Mark nodded jerkily. 'It's likely something to do with that. I was… I don't know where I was at the time.' _

'…_You went after them,' Mark said, remembering playing the level. 'After Lord Fear and Lady Illusion. You followed them into the Nevershine Mines, and you fought Pigface and Dirty Rat, and the spiders… And then you went to the Haunted House… And then you came… here.' _But that hasn't _happened_ yet. And _you_ haven't happened yet_; a small, confused voice inside Mark's head tried to scream at him in annoyance. '…Didn't you?' _

'_Sure, kid, but that's not me,' Ace said, pointing at the screen. 'It's just a game. If it was me I wouldn't have died before. I still don't know how you got so far the way you had things set up. You must've collected a good few amulet pieces, huh? I hear that's how a lot of people make it through. Not the safest method, though.' _

'_The safest… method?' _

'_Of defeating the enemy,' Ace explained. 'It means you're relying on raw power in order to overcome Lord Fear and sometimes that's not enough. I learned that myself. Or _will_. Who can keep it all straight?' _

_Mark's hand moved instinctively to his own chest but of course, the amulet piece wasn't there –at least _one_ thing about this time was right, then, even though it was the one thing Mark kind of wished wasn't. He wanted the amulet. As much as it scared him, he preferred the medallion to have an actual location. After all, if it was nowhere then it could be _anywhere

'_And now I'm going crazy.' Mark sighed, feeling more resigned to the fact that anything else. It figured that all this would get to him, sooner or later. _

_Ace sighed also, shrugging his shoulders. 'You and me both, kid. I know –I'm not even supposed to be here,' he help up his hands in defeat. 'Not _yet_. Which means that either this is a dream, in which case what happens to me isn't really important, or we're both losing it entirely. Don't think I ever _asked_ for this, Mark, it's not like I expected you… or any of your world.' _

'_You would've been happy not to know,' Mark finished Ace's unspoken thought, and then he wondered whether or not there would be anything to remember anyway. If the Sixth Dimension wasn't _real_ before the lightning bolt, then… _

'_Anyway, in case you're wondering, Mark…' (The world outside the window had gotten strangely dark, all of a sudden, and the game behind Mark had switched straight to the "CONTINUE?" scene with no explanation. Mark thought for a second "What's wrong with this game?" then realised it didn't matter.) '…I didn't come here to play games. We've got work to do.'_

'_What? You mean… now? But…' _

'_Evil waits for no knight, Mark,' Ace said. He was back to using his "you're supposed to be a sidekick, please try and act like one, or else I shall be Very Disappointed" voice. The one that Mark always had trouble saying "no" to (he used to manage it okay, but it had been getting harder and harder lately and…_

…_And he was thinking about things that weren't _real_ again. Had to stop that…) _

'_Ace—' _

_Mark thought he could see Ace rolling his eyes –a gesture the old Ace (new? Mark totally doesn't get this) never used to use and which even the new (old? Who cares…) Ace hardly ever does. He's still getting the hang of his human emotions. 'Yeah, I know you don't have powers, kid… took you long enough to convince me, but try to keep up anyway.' _

_And then he flew out of the window (open again, despite the fact that it had been locked shut a moment earlier) and vanished. _

_Mark could think of a lot of reasons not to go along with that. _

_They weren't very convincing reasons. About how wrong and messed up and confusing this all was, his parents and how late it is –too late to be going out and saving the world. Too late to even _try_… _

_He'd used all of the excuses at least once before, but none of them were true right now, and who could lie to a superhero? _

_Mark turned and bolted for his bedroom door, leaving the computer screen to beep quietly to itself, the message still flashing: "CONTINUE: Y/N?"_

And then, just like that, he woke up.

* * *


	2. 25000 Volts of Electricity

**Finally, we're getting somewhere. **

**You have no idea how good that feels.**

* * *

_"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from." -_ -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. 

One.

**Location**: The Haunted House, Level Thirteen of _Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom_.

**Date**: 13/08/07

Just as the clichés always said, when he woke up, it took a few seconds for him to remember where he was and exactly what he was doing there. The second question was a lot harder to answer than the first.

The Haunted House. That was where they were. He should really be disturbed by the fact that this is more of a relief than a problem (better here than the Junkyard –if there's anything left of it– or what remained of the Harpix territory and it's not like they're prisoners here or anything… not in any _intended_ way).

Chuck doesn't seem to be around. Mark thinks that's odd, at first, then he realises that _he's_ the one who's not in their usual room. He's sitting on one of the winding staircases heading down to the basements and he's _not_ entirely insane. Not yet. After all, dreams were supposed to be weird, right?

They'd been trying to rescue Sparx from Climbcrag Castle (_Alone_. He'd been _fairly_ sure neither Lady Illusion nor Random would've supported making the trip –well, Random might've if he was in the right mood– but it'd still been stupid of Mark not to at least _ask_ them), but by the time they'd gotten there she'd _already_ been rescued by the very people Mark hadn't thought to ask for help ('_idiot, no wonder Staffhead finds it so easy to get a laugh from you…_') then Climbcrag had started to disintegrate around them. He and Chuck had had to make their way towards a place that Chuck had pinpointed as the only really stable location in the Game right now.

Which just happened to be the Haunted House.

The fact that Sparx and Random had turned out to be there had just been sheer good luck. Lord Fear… not so much.

Still, as useful as all this information was for confirming just what was going on around him, it _didn't_ explain why he was sleeping on a staircase. He had never sleep walked in his life and had been surprised enough to realise they even _had_ to sleep in this place. Sometimes, was easy to forget that they were inside of a computer game. He remembered Lady Illusion fixing his "spine" during… that mess he got himself into, back at the junkyard, which he isn't going to talk, think or even wonder about. And knowing all the while that there wasn't really even anything _like_ a spine there anymore: just data and broken coding.

He shouldn't think about it, because he didn't want to wonder exactly what the amulet had done to his _head_ at the same time as it was screwing up his spine and… hell, he'd been posting _blog entries_ through his _skull_. (Chuck had described it with more technical language than that, but Mark basically understood it as "channelling the power right through every important bit of his brain and potentially frying them beyond their ability to repair themselves if (when, _when_)they got back to the real world".

Which was scary.

It'd done _something_.

He wasn't going to think about what. Right now, it wasn't important. What was important was…

'_Ace, the plan, this mission, this… getting out _alive_. That's all I want. That's all any of us want… Maybe it's all we've ever wanted since the beginning and I swear that if it happens….' _

'_**...I'll never play a videogame again in my life.'**_

Mark paused. That voce had come from inside of his head, and it sounded like his own thoughts, but it wasn't. It couldn't be. It was a memory of something else he'd said a long time ago.

Mark shivered. Damn that amulet...

Down in the basement, something clattered hard, like stone against metal. There was the distant sound of shrieking and cursing. '_What is that_?' Mark thought.

Something (a voice, maybe) answered him. It felt similar to the odd little voice that had been talking to him in the dream. _**'Random?'**_

'Yeah, he's down there alright,' Mark muttered. Funny, he thought, how crashes and other loud noises in this place always seemed to come back to the cyborg with the mental complex. Then again, Mark supposed that Random knew better than anyone about what it meant to have your mental coding screwed up, so maybe...

'_**Go on, then.'**_ This time, the voice sounded almost like Sparx, tinged with impatience and annoyance and the restrained desire to call him "pipsqueak". Mark instinctively knew that responding coherently to voices in his head was probably a Bad Thing, but he did it anyway. It wasn't like things could get any worse.

Maybe he would just… check in on Random. Just for a moment, to see whether the cyborg was in the mood for trying to kill anyone today or not...

* * *

**Location**: The Haunted House Gardens, Level Twelve of _Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom_. 

**Date**: 12/08/07

'Dude this place is getting to ya.'

He'd expected Chuck to say something like that.

He really had, but… Mark had been hoping that he could at least try to understand.

Chuck knew the Sixth Dimension and everything to do with it better than Mark did. Maybe even better than _Rick_. You'd have thought he'd be able to comprehend his best friend hearing voices in his head, but… apparently he couldn't. Chuck kept staring at him in confusion for a very log time before speaking, his laptop lying open on the ground in front of him with a mess of strange messages scrawling across the screen. 'I mean it. I'm gonna start sleeping at different times to you to avoid the supposed snoring incidents you get so riled up about; you _really_ need to get eight hours.'

'Oh, really?' Mark tried not to sound as put out as he was by that.

'Yeah, really,' Chuck said. 'Explain it once more for me. Make sure I get this, okay because I'm just… I'm not understanding, Mark, and _not understanding_ confuses the hell out of me more than the actual… not understanding does.'

'Right…' Mark raised an eyebrow. 'I didn't get a word of that, just so you know.'

'I know. So, anyway, you were saying?'

Mark thought about it. The voices in his head were silent. 'You know how… sometimes you think about something… in words?'

'Uh…huh,' Chuck nodded slowly and untruthfully. 'That uh… would tend to be how thinking words, Mark.'

'But that's it, isn't it? It _isn't_ how thinking works,' Mark said. 'People don't think in words at all, Chuck, they just… we say _what_ we're thinking out loud in words, but when the thoughts are inside of our head they're just… thoughts. Impressions, you know?'

'...I know that I'm right about the eight hours.'

'Will you just _listen_?' Mark snapped, running out of patience. 'Just go with me on this one for a while, okay?'

Chuck gave him a look which plainly said "you're my best friend and I totally sympathise with you right now, but you're _still_ pretty damn insane". 'Oh-kay, sure. I'll go with it. So what is it about the thoughts that's bothering you?'

'That's what I meant. I'm thinking in _words_. And they don't feel like they're my words, either. They don't _feel_ like they belong to me. I mean, they _do_ at the same time, but…'

'They're not telling you to do crazy things like kill me in my sleep, are they?'

Mark glanced at him irritably. 'No, but that's starting to become an option anyway, it might stop you snoring.'

'I do _not_ snore.'

'Tell that to the cockroaches who think you're trying to serenade them,' Mark smiled.

'What the… I… oh, ha _ha_. You _know_ the cockroaches are going for _you, _dude... which I still haven't been able to explain, by the way. he frowned, concentrating on the screen of his laptop and the mess of signals Mark suspected even Chuck was having trouble understanding.

A laptop inside of a computer world... it was kind of a paradox, really. 'Well, maybe the bugs here just don't like humans. or anything which looks like a Knight.'

'Consider yourself lucky,' Chuck muttered. 'You get the little screaming bugs. I get the Harpix and the _zombies_, dude!' he looked up from the laptop screen (which was showing more and more garbled data every time they opened it, apparently). '…Hey, you think Rotgut told them about me?'

'For your sake I hope not.'

There was a pause which seemed to last longer than it actually did. Mark figured it was the amulet residue, but he kept... phasing out a bit. Losing track of what was going on around him.

He supposed Chuck must feel the same way. After all they were normal human beings who had somehow gotten pulled inside of a videogame which was disintegrating more and more with every passing day. It was impossible to tell how long a day in here was outside there... if it was as long as he thought it was, then their parents must have been going frantic by now.

Mark sighed, trying to work out, again in his mind, exactly how they'd ended up in this situation. Nothing came to him, bar one word.

_'Damn Kilobyte_, Mark rubbed his hands together even though it wasn't really all that cold. 'You still don't know how to get us out of here, do you.'

There was a long moment, and this time mark was sure it lasted as long as it felt. Chuck was always reluctant to admit when he was out of ideas. 'Sorry, dude,' he shrugged eventually. 'I've got nothin'.'

They sat on the rough, coarse "grass" – brownish green in colour – around the left side of the haunted house which dominated the landscape. It was impossible for them to see what was going on on the other side of that massive golden-orange wall, but Mark was pretty sure they didn't _want_ to see what was happening out there anyway. If the game world was really breaking into pieces like chuck said, and the Haunted House was one of the few remaining stable areas of the game, held up by Lord fear's power...

Mark shuddered. There was another thing he knew he shouldn't really think about. 'You mean really, lord Fear's got everything he ever wanted here.'

'Technically, yeah,' Chuck said, seriously, focussing on the shield. 'Almost like he's a God... god of whatever's left of the sixth dimension. He owns it all now.. .every blade of digitally crafted grass.'

**_'God? Is what?'_** The strange voice in Mark's head asked, questioningly, and aloud he said. 'He doesn't own us.'

'Depends on how you look at it,' Chuck shrugged.

There was a yell from somewhere. It sounded like Sparx was getting riled up at one of the Zombies. Then there was a noisy crash which also sounded like Sparx – punching a wall.

Times like this, he really missed Ace. 'They're alright out there, aren't they? Ace, and... Well, Ace?'

'Beats me,' Chuck shrugged. 'As you can probably tell I'm not exactly receiving email here... but I'd worry more about us than about him.'

'Given the choice between being stuck in here with fear or out there with Kilobyte...' mark started, then trailed off as he realised he couldn't actually work out which of those two options was worse. It felt rather like an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" situation.

**_'Frying... pan... what?'_** The voice seemed confused. Mark shook his head hard, forcing himself to ignore it.

'...When god frowns surf the furrows.'

Mark looked up, blinking. '…Sorry, Chuck?'

'It's a proverb, dude. Means you've just gotta ride with whatever the world throws out at you,' Chuck looked up from the laptop screen. Mark didn't know all that much about programming, but he was pretty sure that what was on the screen right now wasn't anything Chuck could make sense of, either. 'Right now, we're just... playing the game, right? The same we would be if we were outside.'

'Right,' mark said slowly, not really understanding. 'And what does that mean.'

'It means that... we have to deal with it in a way that's as close to how we would've dealt with it outside the game as possible,' Chuck said carefully. 'I mean.. .that maybe to get out of here, we have to beat the game... course I don't know where we'd end up after that, and I'm not even all that sure it's possible to beat this game right now... i don't know if there's enough left of it to know when the game is being played...' Chuck groaned, infuriated, shutting the laptop. 'Man, like I said: I've got nothing, 'scept for that.'

'So we have to take out a god,' Mark muttered uneasily, standing up to look upwards at the shield. Referring to Lord Fear as a god, however technically accurate that might be, was a disturbing thing. 'And I don't know about you, Chuck, but that doesn't sound like a good idea right now.'

'Yeah well he is keeping us alive right now.. .and anyway... there's Sparx.'

Sparx, Mark nodded to himself. Really, Sparx was the only reason that neither party had killed the other yet. She was keeping all of them alive, even Lady Illusion. Not that he would've actually tried to kill Fear right now... not that...

Mark's thoughts did a back step as he realised the truth of what he was thinking.

There was more at stake here, he realised than some skeleton trying to take over the world. So much more for them to worry about than the black and white of it all.

It was confusing as _hell_.

Chuck opened his laptop again. 'Hey, do you mind if I run a quick check on the shield out there?'

'A check?' Mark looked at him, 'why?'

'Just a thought. I mean it'd help if I could use the amulet,' he signalled at the piece of... metal or whatever it was, and mark felt himself reaching a hand to it, instinctively, wondering what Chuck was up to.

It had nearly killed him, true, but then again, if the amulet wasn't in his hand right now, then it could've been just about anywhere. Mark really preferred to have the thing which could kill then quite easily within his reach.

And maybe it had always made him feel better, but that had never changed what it was. The amulet had always made him a target.

_So really, they're all right to wonder then they ask why the hell haven't I been killed yet? _

'Sure. Why not?'

He sat down again, and waited as chuck began to type some messages into his computer. The amulet tingled slightly and Mark flinched, but there was nothing more.

'One day I'd like an explanation.' Chuck said, in the voice he normally used when they were discussing their middle school days, or trying to find some corner of the carnival where they could prepare an assault on the Haunted House without being sniffed out (literally) by Pigface. 'For the Ace Lightning thing, you know. How Rick made the program condense into a three-d physiological form. How they were able to develop cognitive thought… that kinda stuff.'

'I've already told you, Chuck,' Mark sighed. 'I gave you a total up-to-this-point review when you first worked this whole thing out. Rick programmed the game funny, I played the game, lightning struck my house –boom, Ace was real. That's it.'

'Yeah but it still doesn't make total sense,' Chuck pointed out. 'For one thing a bolt of lightning carries a charge of twenty-five-thousand volts of electricity. The entire house's energy supply should've failed when it hit. And if you were actually _touching_ the computer when the lightning struck, _you_ should've been totally fried, too.' He paused, leaning back on his hands and staring up at the glittering golden shield surrounding them.

'What do you mean?' Mark frowned.

'Well I'm pretty sure when Rick designed your copy of the game the way he did, he couldn't have made it so it safely siphoned off such a huge amount of energy.' Chuck said. 'Just remember all the technology he had in the Fortress of Solitude. All his protective shielding… and that coolant system. And all _you_ had was one ordinary home computer system. I did the maths, Mark. Channelling all that power through your computer was kind of like expecting an MP3 player to handle all the dialling codes for a NASA supercomputer. Or expecting a human to absorb fifty times their own _body weight_ in water. It just should've have _worked_ man. Even if it had, you should've been turned into an overdone French fry by the time that game finished transforming.'

'Uh… right.' Mark swallowed.

He still remembered the familiar tingle of lightning as the computer joystick had been literally wrenched out of his control –but that was all it had been. Just a mild tingle, nothing more, then Ace Lightning had been _there. Alive._ Fighting _Lord Fear_ _and Lady Illusion_ in the Hollanders new back garden.

And now here was Chuck, casually pointing out that Mark really should've been barbequed in the process. '…Thanks for the visual, Chuck. I'll remember that the next time I play videogames in a lightning storm.'

Chuck grinned. 'Man you haven't actually ever played a videogame since this whole thing started, have you? And I bet you even turn the computer off whenever you hear thunder.'

'Well, yeah… wouldn't you?'

'What are you serious? No way, man, _nothing's_ gonna put me off of finishing the last level of ARMAGEDDON AZARATH.'

'Right. Of course not,' Mark actually, did smile at that. Sometimes where Chuck was involved it was really all you could do. Mark was surprised that either of them had ever so much as touched a computer in their lives since that day.

It was really kind of amazing how calm and casual Chuck was being, considering that they were seemingly waiting patiently for the end of the world (which just happened to be right on their metaphorical digitized doorstep). In fact, scratch that. It wasn't just amazing –it was downright _insane_. The end of an entire reality was hovering less than ten feet in front of them, and Chuck probably knew better than anyone exactly what that "end of the world" was going to entail. And yet here he was, looking as calm as if this were just another Tech class, or a day at the beach.

It _did_ look a little like a beach, actually. In a weird, warp-at-the-end-of-reality kind of way. They were stood at the very edge of what Mark figured was all that remained of the Sixth Dimension. The large protective shield that Lord Fear had created, and which now surrounded the entire Haunted House, was warped and bent where it touched the ground, leaking in towards them every now and then like a tide. A solid wall of green-gold-red water. The edges seemed ragged, like the edges of a bank or an incomplete painting. Mark was fairly sure there wasn't anything really like water out there, but it certainly looked that way from here.

Something twinged in Mark's stomach. Or where he figured his stomach _would_ have been if they had currently _had_ any real flesh and blood. It was a familiar sensation that he couldn't honestly recognize as a feeling, sound, smell or anything like that. He didn't know what it was, he just knew it was _there_.

He had heard stories (probably from Chuck) that the human brain "warped unrecognizable visual inputs into whatever it could closest match it to in its memory". They called it "Sensory Displacement", or something. Explosions became balls of light and movement, hot air became steam, the smell of death became a taste on your tongue. Howling winds turned into voices and the voices turned into sensations that burned and screamed, warning you of things you couldn't prevent and terrified the children that still remained.

Not that any of the people left in this world could really be called _children_ anyway. Most of them weren't. Most were barely even _alive_ at all, but they had known enough to know they were in danger and had all made their way to the Haunted House. Mark watched as they shivered in fear: the freaks, monsters and evils that remained, all gathered together in the Haunted World, waiting, like everybody else, for the end to come. Or else for things to reset themselves and go back to the way they had always been. Waiting for someone to press a button, to open a door, waiting for the realm with a lucky number… Zombies, Harpix, Rodents, Mutants, nothing more than that, really, small pieces, small creatures, things Lightning Knights were made to kill but which could never truly die unless deleted and—

Wait.

_Stop_.

Mark felt a shiver run up his spine as he pulled himself back to reality. He clutched at the amulet piece around his neck, trying to recognize where all those thoughts had just come from. That was…

What _was_ that?

'Hey, dude? Earth to… uh, well _Sixth Dimension_ to Mark Hollander? Feel free to come back for a recharge any time now.'

Mark blinked a few times, and found his tongue, still trying to work out just what he had seen. '…What?'

'You spaced out. Can we try and stay focussed here, please? That amulet is still going weird around you and I'd really rather you were, you know, paying attention while I was using it. I don't want to be sucked out into that… mess.' Chuck pointed up at the bubbling wall of multicoloured water and Mark suddenly remembered what they were doing out here –they were reinforcing the wall, using his amulet piece's power. Fear had… well, he'd _told_ them that someone had to do it, and Mark still wouldn't let anyone else touch the final piece of the amulet. So basically it had to be him.

That was why Chuck was now sitting in front of him, trying very hard to deal with all this as if it were just another simple computer problem and nothing more complicated than that. But Chuck was frowning slightly now, so this must have been a difficult problem. 'Still trying to get to grips with this, man… there's so much data flying around. Most of it's been dumped in the recycle bins, I can't keep track of any of the realms anymore and it I don't even _know_ how to begin processing the power flow in that goddamn _wall. _ Uh, not that I'm _complaining_ about the wall,' he added talking slightly louder as if afraid the wall might hear him and take offence. Or else Lord Fear would. 'The wall is good. Wall _equals_ life, life is good. No complaints about the wall here.'

Mark stood up, feeling the amulet prickle with cool static as he did so, and walked a few steps towards the wall. He stood as close to it as he dared, (which was about three feet away). If he reached out, he could probably touch it, but he had no idea what that would've felt like and really had no desire to find out. 'You know what this reminds me of?' he said. 'Googler.'

'What, the wall?' Chuck pushed his spectacles up his nose.

'Yeah… well, his puppets anyway. That energy-leaking power of theirs. The venom bite. It looks just like that when you see it on your skin.'

'Man, _now_ who's coming out with creepy visuals?' Chuck stamped at a button on his keyboard way too hard. 'I don't get it. There's nothing more I can do, just… can you hold position there for a moment? I think the amulet likes the proximity, or something.'

Yeah. Mark had noticed that. The amulet had been cold for weeks, but closer to the wall it seemed to act up, shimmering slightly against his chest.

Or maybe that was just more of that "sensory displacement" stuff.


	3. Shadows

**Standard Disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated. **

* * *

"_Love is giving someone the ability to destroy you, but trusting that they won't."_

– Unknown.

Two.

**Current location**: The Sixth Dimension, Rocky Straits, Level 2.5.

**Date**: 09/08/07.

The Diamond Shafted Tunnels of the Nevershine Mine.

Mark had been here before. Sort of, anyway. Granted, at the time, he hadn't actually physically been_ there_. He'd been operating through Ace back in the days when he had been nothing more than a videogame character inside of a computer screen.

Sort of like an Avatar. He'd come to think of it that way now: courtesy of Chuck, (who had called him that after the Amulet took over his body) and too many hours of watching sci-fi movies he'd never have looked at twice before coming to Conestoga Hills. (Hanging around with Chuck Mugel really _did_ things to a guy…)

Back then Ace had been nothing more than a videogame character, pressing on after his twenty-fifth time of falling into the open chasms after that part where the Spiders attacked. Mark couldn't remember the exact point at which he had given up on this level and opted to take the Alternative Storyline by going back through the Rocky Straits instead, but now he was starting to wish he hadn't.

If he hadn't, then maybe he'd have some idea now about how to get _out_ of here.

'Can't go back the way we came, man,' Chuck let out a breath Mark suspected he'd been holding for a while and staring at the screen of the laptop on the ground in front of them. 'There's not enough charge on the wrist cannon to get us through even half of those nests… and me without any Zoaretta-Charms.'

Mark's face twitched into a nervous grin. 'Yeah, you're always out when you need them, huh?'

'Yeah, and then when you _don't_ need 'em, they're filling up all your inventory boxes so you can't even fit in a Jacob's Upgrade,' Chuck snorted, missing the joke. Or maybe joining in –Mark couldn't be sure. Funny. Chuck was usually easier to read than this.

Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom was that sort of game. The rules were changing all the time. What happened depended on how you behaved, and everything sprung from individual storylines. According to Chuck, there were seven different variations on the ending story, and few people in the world had seen even one of them.

Very few of those seven endings seemed to involve getting through the Nevershine Mines.

And Mark was really starting to think he should've thought about that _before_ they took the left-hand path.

As they pressed back into a wall, hiding from a shadow which might have either been a Zombie or just a Lightning Mole burrowing, (they weren't going to risk finding out for sure) a small part of Mark's brain reminded him that this _was_ the Fastest Way to Climbcrag Castle, according to the cheat book Chuck had always scorned him for having. If they were going to get to Sparx before her power dropped to Zero, then this was the way to go.

There should've been zombies down there – there always had been when he played the game before, but there weren't. They'd hardly seen so much as a shadow of one.

'H-hey… Did you know,' Chuck stammered, seemingly just to break the silence. 'That most ghosts are sighted _inside_ of buildings.'

'Yeah, Chuck, I did. We both watched that program, remember?'

D_efinitely_ did strange things to a guy.

'Oh. Yeah. Well… well maybe that's what _real_ ghosts are, man, Chuck whispered. 'Just… spirits and energy, trying to find something solid to hold onto. Even if that's the walls. Like they're just scared to go.'

It didn't sound like a nice way to live. To exist. 'I'm not planning on becoming a ghost, Chuck. Or anything like it, come on, let's move.'

'Our voices don't echo down here,' Chuck murmured, seemingly going off on a tangent. 'You notice that? I mean… it's a cave, right? And the game had echoes, programmed in.' He jolted suddenly to a halt and Mark very nearly collided with his back before starting to edge in front of him.

'_Chuck_, for goodness sakes—'

'_Seriously_, man,' Chuck's voice practically squeaked. 'I've got a bad feeling. Something's not _right_, something's totally skewed here. The data's all _bad_.'

Another obvious point, Mark thought –things hadn't been right down here for a long while, - the game was breaking down piece by piece, and they were struggling to get to Climbcrag and help Sparx before time ran out and that place was disintegrated too. But when he opened his mouth to mention this, he suddenly saw that Chuck had a point.

Their voices _didn't_ echo… and their _shadows_ didn't move either.

Mark had hardly noticed it before, but the further they got into the cavern, the more obvious it became. Their shadows were digitally created images, printed on the back of the room in the light of the entrance, but the shadow-shapes hadn't moved at all since they came in.

Mark waved an arm a bit –and the shape of the shadow on the wall which should have been his moved this time, but slowly, sluggishly, out of pace with him. Mark was reminded of old cartoons where some random 'toon looked at a reflection in the mirror – just like himself, moving as he was, but it was always really some other character in disguise and, sooner or later, the other would slip up and let the world know that the mirror frame was empty and the face he was looking at wasn't his own.

And god, he was _really_ paying too much attention to Chuck's viewing habits.

'Uh. Oh-kay, that's…'

The shadow moved again.

'…That's not right.'

And this time, it _smiled. _

Actually, though, _smiled_ was the wrong word. Try _leered_ or _scowled _and you were closer to the mark. Nobody and _nothing _could _smile_ like that, not even Lord Fear or Kilobyte. Mark felt like he was waiting for it to start laughing. He consciously tightened his hand into a fist, wishing he had his wrist cannon.

Something in the pit of Mark's brain warned him furiously not to blink.

He meant to make himself sound clear and sure, but somehow his voice came out with the same terrified sounding squeak as Chuck's had. 'There… there aren't any zombies here,' Mark whispered dryly. 'But there should be. I've been here they… they killed me so many times. But they're not here.'

Chuck's hand snatched back to the laptop he was clinging to under his arm, but was obviously thinking the same as Mark was, as he didn't even glance away from the shadow, still leering and staring at them through the stone, stones of the crystal cavern seeming to make up it's eyes. '…Mark, man? I… what…'

'They're in the walls,' Mark finished, knowing as he said it that it was true.

And then the shadow's sneer was gone.

'Just pictures on the wall, right…?' Chuck swallowed. 'Just… it's just trying to scare us, that's all. Yeah. Creepy shadows, creepy tunnels, major graphics glitch. I-I get it. Cool, creepy, can we leave now please?'

Mark stepped backwards several feet. The shadow that was supposed to be Chuck's seemed to merge in besides his own. Except that _neither_ of them was theirs. They couldn't be. If it was just trying to scare them then it was doing a good job. And then they were changing into something else and what used to be a sneer had become a figure –but still not the right one. Not Mark's or Chuck's. The shadow on the wall was turning into a outline with a totally different shape. Female, and sharp edged and…

'…Sparx?' Mark whispered.

Sparx. Or at least, the shape of her, without any of the detail. The way she looked when she threw back her head laughing or drew her sword. It moved like the outline of the animations that always appeared on the Ace Game Loading screens. The part of Mark's brain that had not yet caught up with the situation wondered what it was loading.

And then Chuck shrieked. _Right_ in Mark's ear, which would have been more annoying than anything else, if Chuck hadn't sounded so terrified. And then Mark turned round and realised that it _wasn't_ Chuck screaming after all. There were more shadows now –dozens of them, seemingly climbing up the walls. Eyes made out of the glimmers of crystal, mouths just darker than the rest of their bodies.

So that was where the Zombies had gone.

'Oh… shit.'

The Sparx-shaped shadow was moving now, looking as if it was trying to climb right out of the wall. And then it was drawing back and facing them and _slashing _– the rocks sparked as an invisible sword connected, like an image moving on the other side of a mirror. Like the shadow inside it was trying to break free. Mark willed the diamond wall not to break as the surface sparked with pink light.

Pink.

…Shadows couldn't _make_ pink light, right? Not _normal_ ones and not the ones in the Nevershine caverns, either. There was only one person Mark knew that _could_ do that.

Except that this really couldn't be the real deal. It couldn't…

Mark looked back at the first of the shadows. It was sneering again, but now the sneer came out of Sparx's face, dark and cold and accusing. 'No, _Sparx_…'

'And… and that would be a Wall Curse,' Chuck's face had lost its colour. Or maybe it had already gone pale before and Mark just hadn't noticed. 'But that… no. Not here. T-the Rule Book…'

'Stuff the rulebook!' Mark practically yelled, and surprised himself by meaning it, terrified and angry by equal measures. 'Chuck, get bac—'

Before he could finish, the diamond wall cracked, right where the sword of the shadow-Sparx was striking.

The Wall Curse that shouldn't have been there leapt. Mark saw it detach itself from the wall and glide around like an outspread curtain like Sparx herself, leaping from a Lightning Flash all ready for battle. It barely disturbed the air when it moved. What little air-disruption there was seemed to come from the sudden screaming that echoed against the cavern walls in a way it really _shouldn't_ have (their voices hadn't echoed, so why should this?) Chuck lurched, and it took Mark a couple of seconds to realise why – the shadow of Sparx had touched his foot and was wrapping itself around his ankle.

No. Not Sparx. It _didn't_ haveSparx.

Sparx wasn't _here_, Mark told himself furiously. Sparx wasn't _okay,_ he _knew_ she wasn't, but she wasn't _here_, either. She was over in Climbcrag, being tortured by Kellamy and maybe even Kilobyte and she wasn't _here. _

But the feeling clutching his leg right now was very much real. He remembered the amulet, trailing streams of electric shock, a burning sensation over his lungs. And then there was Zip, gripping his arm and Sparx's arm gripping at _him_ and shining.

The pulse upgrade.

* * *

'_Hey… what if you get Lord Fear's piece of the amulet? Maybe you'll become a superhero too!' _

_They'd been here before. About a hundred times. Well, more like twenty-or-so. Either way, Pete still wasn't getting the message. _

_Mark sometimes thought that Pete had some really weird ideas about this game. But then, why not? It was a game, after all. It shouldn't have been happening in real life and he's still only half convinced that Pete believes what he's saying anyway. _

_Pete did have an excuse, though. He'd never been here and hadn't actually seen what Fear looked like when he was breathing (metaphorically) down your neck. _

'_I don't want superpowers, Pete... My life's already been turned upside down by this game.' _

'_How's that, kid?' _

_Mark looked up from the screen. _

_Sparx. Sitting on his bed, flicking absently through one of his comic books. 'You're not getting to the good stuff, kid.' Sparx said. 'Seriously, anyone can handle it if you try. That's what Ace always said to me, anyway. Do right, fear not and all that stuff.' _

'_Uh…' Mark swallowed, trying and failing to come up with a more coherent question than just: 'What?' _

'**Access Denied,'**_ the speakers answered his question. _

_Mark looked back at the screen, but Pete's video message had vanished and, in its place, was the same loading screen that he had (or would, or... whatever)that happened after he gained a piece of the Amulet while playing Ace Lightning. _

**Loading Level Seven. **

…_Wait, what? _

'_Level…Seven? I've never heard of…' _

_Mark considered reaching for the booklet besides him but he really already knew what it would say –Ace Lightning consisted of six (extremely large) levels on the Intermediate player-skill level. You got an extra two if you set it to expert, but Mark didn't have the game at that level and even if they had, they weren't supposed to happen _here_: the extra levels of "Magery Square" and "Canary Factory" were located way back in the early stages. _

_Mark could count. There shouldn't have _been_ a level seven here. _

_And he'd never seen that kind of _loading screen_ before, either. Usually the loading screens were accompanied by small animations of a Lightning Knight: Sparx or Ace or Random, performing action moves and striking poses as the game loaded. This wasn't how loading screens were supposed to look .and they didn't usually _talk_ to you, either. _

'**Stand by**_**,'**__ it said. Stand by for _what

_But there it was – flashing on the screen with an energy bar that didn't seem to be loading anything at all. The scene had frozen on Ace's expression, mouth half open in the beginning (or maybe the end) of a sentence mark would never hear. _

_Maybe, sometimes, Pete's methods had a point, Mark though as he rattled the joystick control in his hand. No way was he losing all his skill points again. No _way.

'…_What's wrong with this game?' _

'_Looks like it's pretty screwed up, huh?' Sparx said. Her voice had suddenly softened and calmed a little and she was no long her sitting on his bed, but standing leaning over his shoulder. It was only now that mark noticed she was wearing her uniform – something she hadn't worn in months. _

_Mark paused and turned to look at her, not even bothering to work out whether he was dreaming again or not. 'It figures,' Sparx said. 'I guess we must've messed it up a lot. Maybe that's what's happening… I don't know. Kinda failed my extra-dimensional physics class, you know?' _

_Mark opened his mouth to ask what the hell Extra Dimension Physics was, but then thought better of it. _

_Somewhere outside the window, the thunder was building. He hoped it didn't rain – not with his parents still out and the fact that dad still hadn't quite grasped the concept of driving on the other side of the road yet. Mark kind of doubted he'd handle it in a downpour. _

'_Damn it,' Sparx hissed. 'Kid, look I… I have to go. Like now.' _

'_Do you…' he paused – no, not paused. He hesitated, reaching out a hand to grip the place where her arm had been a moment ago. '…I mean, do you have to?' _

'_C'mon, kid. We both know I shouldn't be here. Keep playing. I know it sucks and all, but… well.' She shrugged heavily and smiled. 'It's all we can do, right? Play the game, whether we want to or not.'_

_It wasn't a very Sparx-like thing to say. Mark opened his mouth to mention this. However, he didn't have the chance, because that was the moment his bedroom vanished, and he became aware once more of the cold feeling if the creeping shadows of the Nevershine mine, and his hand, clutching the amulet piece around his neck.

* * *

_

'**Stand by.'**

Mark blinked. The world came sharply back into focus. The dull blue glisten of the Mine walls and the shadow clutching his leg. He grimaced. A part of Mark's mind he didn't know he had was talking, screaming, in fact, as loud as it could. His free hand clutched the amulet around his neck.

'So, you're Sparx, right? Can you do _this_?'

He pulled and twisted.

Two years ago, Mark had enrolled in a martial arts class.

Actually, he'd agreed to because his girlfriend of the time had seemed to think it was a good idea. He sucked at it. Seriously sucked. He couldn't go twenty seconds without being thrown on the ground by the lowest imaginable graded belt, but they was a single thing he had learned –being down on the ground meant there was nowhere further down for you to go. You had nothing left to lose.

You could do whatever you wanted.

Mark twisted his leg and kicked. The same way he'd kick at a soccer ball. There was a sickening crack as his foot made contact with the shadows neck.

It broke it's hold for just long enough for mark to get away from its grip. Then it lurched back against the wall, smiling a creepy, un-Sparx smile and twisting its neck back into place. Mark could hear Chuck gagging in disgust.

Mark simply watched it, looking for Sparx in this face which was nothing like hers.

_Not Sparx. Not even the new her. Not Sparx at all. _

And then it materialised beneath his fingers, cold and metallic and very much welcome.

The wrist cannon. Mark glanced at Chuck.

'Chuck, what—?'

'Power exchange, hurry!' Chuck yelled. His eyes were wide and fixed on the screen of the laptop cradled in his arm, as if he'd just done something he hadn't thought it was possible to do. 'I ran the power through the external hard drive and… oh, to hell, Mark, just _do it already_!'

Mark didn't need telling twice. The wrist cannon slipped onto his arm. Like meeting an old friend he thought, and for one brief second, felt amused.

No, wait, he _did_ feel happy. Even while he was turning around, raising his firing arm and pointing in the direction of an enraged shadow. The feeling swelled up in his throat out of _nowhere _and…

And he'd never felt like that. He'd never felt _happy. _Not in weeks, anyway. Not since the last time Kat gripped his hand, or the time Sparx admitted he wasn't just a useless mortal.

'_**You can't kill me.'**_

'Wanna bet?' Mark answered.

It didn't laugh when he said that, but to Mark, it felt as if it did- a tremor running right through the cavern, shooting into the base of his spine. The sword-of-shadow rises over its head. He repositions the cannon just a touch. _**'You can't. You don't have it in you. Squirt. You mortals were never worth much. I was always the better sidekick, wasn't I, Mark? I fit the part.' **_

Mark felt himself flinch before he could stop himself. And that made the shadows quake all the more. _'No. Ignore it. It's not… oh come on, how _obvious_ can you get, it's not—'_

'…Sparx, man.'

Mark glanced. Chuck was still there, on his knees, eyes fixed on Mark even while his fingers kept dancing across the laptop keyboard. 'It's not her. Sparx can't make cracks like that. She can't.' He grinned shakily, giving a brief glance to a shadow finger creeping against his shoulder, Mark hadn't actually realised but the things had gotten everywhere, crawling in around his feet like shadows on Halloween. 'It… its okay, seriously, cream the thing already, dude. I'm sick of caverns here.'

That was all Mark actually needed.

Mark had never been totally certain just how the wrist cannon was supposed to work. It never needed charging up, so its power _had_ to come from somewhere else. Solar, maybe. Or from contact with the user. He remembered the first few weeks – feeling like garbage, every time he used the thing, and the burst of energy when Kilobyte died, and suddenly it made sense. There wasn't much sun down here –only shadows, and he'd never felt angrier in his life.

Chuck was pressing buttons on the laptop but Mark couldn't be sure what they were. Whatever it was, he knew what it felt like. Like the wrist cannon was trembling.

'…_**Think I'm scared of you, kid? I'm not. Not **_**you**_**.' **_

'You're _not_ Sparx,' Mark hissed through gritted teeth. The calm, contented feeling was gone now, faded back into his head as if it had never been there.

'_**I don't have to be. Just **_**die**_** already.' **_

Definitely not Sparx.

Alright, then.

Alright.

He made a note to ask Chuck, later, which of them it was that fired first, but he had the suspicion it was her. The wrist cannon's energy shock just happened to be faster, wrapping itself around the light, then the sword, then around the shadow-Sparx's wrist. When she screamed it sounded just like Sparx screaming. That made Mark hesitate, but only for a second. The other shadows scattered across the walls, seeming to rise up and down like black liquid, and then they were gone.

The chasm erupted with a shockwave Mark was fairly certain wasn't coming from him, or the Shadow-Sparx, or Chuck's laptop, for that matter. He almost thought he could hear the walls crack even though by that point, he was definitely totally deaf. The ground was gone from under their feet and there was a disturbing cracking noise, coming somewhere from Chuck's direction. Mark didn't have time to yell for him.

'Man, you shouldn't have done that.'

He knew Chuck was stating the obvious. Mark's skin (or whatever it was now, instead) was burning, muscles aching where the curse had touched. But at least it had gone now, faded away, back into the glittering surface of the walls –the data made up to look like crystal turning black as it touched.

'I had to.'

'Uh. No, man. No, you totally _didn't_,' Chuck sounded half angry but didn't seem to have the nerve to really get riled up at Mark, right now. 'You just had to wait a couple of god damn minutes for me to… to access an inventory and get a hold of a Missile or three, you didn't have to… man, first rule of the videogame _don't touch the freaky magic_! …You alright?'

Mark wanted to tell him that they might not have had another couple of minutes, but really wasn't in the mood, so he just settled for saying "Yeah," and focussed on regaining the feeling in his hands. His skin prickled with pins and needles – and actually, that sensation was almost comforting. He hadn't felt anything quite so human since he'd come to the Sixth Dimension. Mark supposed that there was nothing quite as human as losing the sensation in your fingers.

And the way back wasn't blocked any longer. Not with that curse, creeping in through all the spiders nests. There was a way back.

'_Yeah, a way back into another route, that's probably just as freaking dangerous, except in different ways_,' Mark thought, scornfully.

'You okay?' No answer. '…Chuck?'

'Uh,' Mark could hear Chuck swallowing a gulp air of that he didn't actually need to take–it wasn't like either of them actually _had_ to breathe–, but which probably made him feel better anyway. 'I… I think I just discovered what White Hot Oblivion smells like, man.'

Mark smiled a bit –and it felt a lot more genuine, this time and less like some weird sensation that'd sprung on him for no reason, which was probably a good thing. 'Yeah? What's that?'

'S'kinda like Zombie breath. Or that smell that follows Duff Kent around whenever the Rat's been nearby.'

Mark swallowed the laugh before it could emerge. He didn't trust himself to laugh, right now. 'Yeah, that's what I thought. There's a bit of Zip and Snip's venom in there too, isn't there?'

'Wouldn't, man, never smelled it. Didn't even know it _smelled_ actually…'

'Trust me,' Mark pulled himself into a sitting position, willing his arms to stop shaking. 'You don't want to.'

When he finally looked around again, the cavern seemed almost empty. He could still catch small trickles of black light, leaking away into the corners of the walls and…

This had never happened in the game, he realised. Not like that – sure he'd seen the shadows, but they were always part of the games internal graphics. They'd never come out of the walls and taken shapes and screamed at him when he got near and…

Mark knew he was only frightening himself, so stopped that train of thought while he still could. '_Ignore it. Forget it. Think about Sparx. It's her you're following not stupid, voiceless thoughts in your brain_.'

'So. Dude.' Chuck stammered. 'Can we go back now? Like to-the-Rocky-Straits back? I know the Rocky Straits. Rocky straits are good.'

'Y-yeah,' Mark pulled himself to his feet, blatantly ignoring the little voice in his head telling him that wasn't a good idea. 'That's probably a good idea.'

* * *


	4. Screaming 'Roaches

**Standard disclaimers apply. Certain original characters are the property of various role-players and will be credited as such when they appear. **

* * *

"_Fate is a funny thing. It swells up like raging waters that we are forced to travel. It provides no exit. No deviation. It drops us in a bottomless ocean and compels us… we either swim, or we drown... __And sometimes, as we struggle against the tide, a great truth arises. We've been here before."_

-Batman: Issue #650.

Three.

_No one could say for certain where it all began. _

_In the years to come, some of the people involved (the more romantic amongst them anyway) would say that it began with a love story. And, like all love stories, it left destruction and broken-down understandings in its wake. Other people would say that it all started from the very moment that 25000 volts of electricity struck a TV aerial and brought to live something which should not have existed, _a la_ Frankenstein's monster._

_Other people say that it began a long time before then. That it started with the creation of a game called "_Ace Lightning and The Carnival of Doom_" a traditional, teenagers science fiction rampage that turned into something so much more, because one man got a little too ambitious and placed too much faith in fictional villains who could never have won in the first place. _

_But none of that is important now. You don't need to know the beginning of this story. All you need to know is where things are now. _

_There are people within the game now. Real people. People of flesh and blood and data. And that game, that fictional world which started everything in one fell swoop of thunder and lightning, is beginning to break down. _

_Those who still live and consider themselves worthy of fear and terror are attempting to escape. They gather and converge in the few remaining areas of the dimension which have not yet broken down to nothing. But the games destruction is endless and relentless, ad will not end until they have all been consumed anyway. _

_The game is dying. But then, how can a game die, if it was never truly alive? How can those trapped within it be destroyed if they were never really... real? _

_Some of them were real from the start. Others... we aren't entirely sure. Maybe they became real after their interactions with the real world. Maybe the memories they have before the would do well to be destroyed along with the Sixth dimension. _

_Nobody can be entirely sure of exactly how it all began, but one thing alone is a certainty: it all began with Ace Lightning. It all began with a human boy. It all began with a love story. _

_And it all began with a smallboy, created for a video game cut scene to flesh out a story, and bringer of a young woman's nightmares for many years to come.

* * *

_

**Location:** The Rocky Hills Sub Level.

**Date**: 09/08/07

The amulet was cold.

Which was weird, because the amulet had _never_ been cold before. Not even that time when he'd hidden it in the fridge so the evils wouldn't find it when they stormed his house. It'd always been warm, even first thing on a morning when it'd been sitting by the bed all night. The metal (if that even really was metal –it felt heavy enough but who could tell with that game?) remained just slightly warmer than human skin so Mark always knew it was there even when he didn't have a hold of it.

The first time the power surged (the day he released Sparx from the Sixth Dimension), it had burned red hot, nearly scorching his fingers, but the second time it had been easier. Or maybe he'd just been expecting it that time so hadn't felt it so much. Chuck had even tested it in the science labs, once. It had never dropped below human body temperature. The Amulet was never colder than Mark was.

He'd never mention it to Ace, but... it was actually part of the reason why Mark hadn't just pushed the piece straight back to him the moment Ace tried to hand it over. Holding the amulet piece in his hands had made everything seem a little more real which, funnily enough, had served as both a comforting thought and a careful warning. Comforting because it meant Mark knew he wasn't just going completely bonkers, scary because of whom he knew really _would_ be coming after him to get it and that they would do anything to get him out of the way.

Funny logic, but it worked for him. It worked to convince him that _they_ were real, too. Even if that reality consisted of Kilobyte's tentacle wrapped around his neck ('_Whoa, okay, disturbing thoughts, stop thinking about that _right_ now, Mark._') Or Sparx giving him a harder-than-she'd-thought-it-was thump across his shoulder. Because he'd really rather _not_ be going crazy and just _imagining_ all of these superheroes coming out of his videogame and having massive identity crises thank you very much. The amulet was warm, so that meant this was real. _Everything_ was real, even while it also _wasn't_.

Except now the amulet piece was cold in his hands, and something definitely wasn't _right_ at all.

Not that it took an amulet piece (or a computer genius, for that matter) to work that out.

He was completely blaming Rick for this.

'Dude there is no way we're gonna get through. We shouldn't even _be_ here.'

'Yeah, Chuck, I know.' Mark swallowed, but the lump in his throat refused to go away. Along with that annoying buzz which he was starting to think sounded worse than Chesborough's constant droning during physics class. He kept his eyes fixed on the two rather worried looking Serviceable Oxen drifting about on the path below them. They looked bony and old and so very different from how the creatures normally looked – like the blue flesh was wearing away from their bones, but Mark had a feeling those horns could still _hurt_. 'I don't know how we're going to get past them either.'

'No, dude, that's not what I meant. I mean the carnival is total bad karma!' Chuck whispered, waving his hands about dramatically. Maybe this damn world was rubbing off on them. 'Think about it. Any time we're even anywhere _close_ to a little dipper or… or a coconut shy we're either coming back from a Life-Or-Death situation or we're about to start one. This is tempting disaster so much I don't even wanna think about it.'

Mark started to shake his head in a way that he'd been doing since the day he'd met the guy, then he noticed what Chuck had actually just said.

'But… We're not _in_ the carnival, Chuck.'

'Not according to logic we're not, man, but according to the map we are.'

Mark frowned. 'What? But…'

He spared another glance over the rock behind which they were hiding, to look at what he figured was supposed to be a part of an old fashioned building sticking out of a rock face, but which now looked more like a worn down boulder. Rocky Straights – Ther place where the Rock Demons and Harpix lived. He remembered playing this level before, and he knew it was at least an hours playing time away from the Carnival of Doom. 'Chuck I don't know what your computers telling you but it's got to be screwed up. This _isn't_ the carnival. It isn't even close.'

Chuck however, continued stubbornly pointing at his laptop screen in an insistent gesture. 'Just _look_ at this. See, _this_ data used to be way over _there_ but now it's way over _here_ sometime. This may _look_ like the Rocky Straights, but there's mixed up energy from like, seven different levels, I… is that a canary?' he blinked rapidly at the screen for a moment at some strand of coding which made sense only to him. 'Uh… Wait, no. Forget I said that. It's not a canary; it's only a Just Eagle.' Chuck leaned back, clearly understanding what was going on inside of the screen a damn sight better than Mark was. 'Weird… I guess it's like the bathtub effect.'

'The… bathtub?' Mark blinked as slowly as he could manage, what with the pixels and everything (yes, he was at least insane enough to have started monitoring his blinking patterns. He was _definitely _doing it in some kind of sequence here, like the robot on that Star Trek program Chuck had made him watch once.)

'You know. Like when you pull the plug out of the bathtub and everything goes circling down it in a clockwise direction? Unless you're in the southern hemisphere, in which case it's currently circling in a—'

'Chuck., _focus_.'

'Oh. Sorry, man.' Chuck leaned back against nothing in and pushed his glasses up his nose. Funny how he still kept doing that. 'What I mean… is that as it breaks up, the information that makes up the game is spiralling _inwards_ like water down a drain. It's being sucked into…' he trailed off.

'…Yeah? Into what?' Mark prompted.

'I haven't got the slightest idea, man.'

'Oh. Great.' Mark let out his breath in a sigh (funny how he kept doing that, too.) 'If you don't mind, I'd rather not find out right now. Let's go.'

Chuck didn't argue.

And they almost got past the Oxen without being noticed, until Chuck went and sneezed.

'Oh, _Chuck_!'

'Uh... sorry. We're gonna run now, right?'

'Yes, yes!'

'Running!'

* * *

**

* * *

Location**: The Haunted House Lower Courtyard. 

**Date**: 12/08/07

'...Relax, Lady. The zombies aren't going to try and damage you today. Actually they've been rather peaceful.'

Lady Illusion reappeared when he addressed her, a small Screaming Cockroach near the door melting and bulging out into her usual form. Somehow he seemed able to tell when it was really her in some random (no pun intended whatsoever) morph rather than an actual minion. She had yet to work out how he knew these things.

'You shouldn't be here,' Random said, blankly. 'If Lord Fear finds out...'

'Lord Fear won't,' she said, with a great deal more confidence than she honestly felt. Truth be told she was itching to get away from that cramped up tower room where Lord Fear (Sparx, truly, Lord Fear would have killed her on sight had the option seemed logical) had opted to keep her. After she, like all the realm's creatures, had run to the Haunted House in hopes of escaping the collapsing world beyond.

'The minions might tell him.'

'Things haven't worked that way around here in a long time. They don't have enough energy or fight in them these days. The minions, that is.'

Random scoffed slightly, watching a Zombie crawling past them several metres away. Or rather, watching the _remains_ of a zombie –it must have gotten too close to one of the currently-living walls that were eating everything that touched them (part of Fear's new power-gaining methods, he supposed) or maybe Random's evil side had gained a brief moment of control and found it to be weak and undeserving of existence. Though that kind of thing had been happening less and less frequently since the incident with Mark and the amulet at the junkyard. 'We should consider ourselves lucky, then. Seems your monsters haven't eaten us yet…'

It was almost a jibe –but not quite. She'd like to tell herself she knows him well enough to be able to tell the difference between his carefully veiled insults and his honest jokes, but then, she'd probably be lying. He was having a bad day, likely. Wanted her gone before he could… change. 'You're either talking about the hallucinations or the walls. Which is it?'

'Possibly both. Are you alright?'

She was almost surprised that he asked, (he is their resident insane-cyborg, after all). 'Yes… For the time being.'

That was a lie, but only barely. She _was_ alright, for the present. Sleep helped –where she could find time for it. And Sparx, for all her demands and insults and apparent continued hatred of her, had been surprisingly… modest about her new position. There had been few nightmares and no hallucinations for a while. No former partners appearing through the walls to torment her moments before she found her sleep. (Even though she knew by now that they _weren't_ hallucinations at all, that fact didn't really help matters. Hallucinations may have been disturbing, but they couldn't hurt you. Maniacal former-Lord's and Lovers both could and often did.)

'This place won't last,' Random added, after a moment. 'Things are already falling apart down here.'

'You're probably right,' Lady Illusion nodded. It would be so like Fear to overestimate his abilities, even in the event of a collapsing world. 'There's nothing much else we can do about it.'

'Speak for yourself, Lady Illusion, I had kind of planned on thinking of _something_.'

'Good luck with that, because I'm out of ideas.' She sat down on the steps, watching a screaming cockroach trembling a few feet away. Their screams had been more like whines lately, though they kept trying. It was all they could do. 'Those bugs are supposed to signify danger approaching, aren't they?'

'So _Mark_ is dangerous?' Random asked, dryly.

Lady Illusion almost smiled. 'Depends on how you look at him. It's only a superstition really. They just don't like being disturbed, and they don't come much more disturbing than mortals.'

'Yeah well…' Random shuffled. 'Don't ask me, you clearly spent more time down here than I ever want to.' His right eye seemed to flicker with a dim, green glow but never once did the LED touch upon red. Lady Illusion found herself wondering absently just who had thought of installing that thing, and whether on not it had been a part of some attempt to try and anticipate Random's changes. 'Still, if it's true, they've been making a lot—'

A cockroach screamed loudly and, hearing it, the one near to lady Illusion's foot started too, in a piercing, violin-like wail. Somewhere in the building, Lady Illusion could imagine the humans jumping several feet in the air. The scream, however, wasn't nearly as loud as she'd expected it to be.

'…Of noise.' Random finished, removing his one good hand from where it had been clasped to his ear. '…Mark and Chuck never seem to get used to those things.'

'Mark never seems to get used to _anything_ here… first name terms?'

'I've heard you call them by their names yourself.'

'I suppose.' She watched the now silent cockroach as it sat there, coughing to itself, as if wishing to scream but not able to find the energy anymore. Eventually it curled itself up into a ball and stayed still long enough for her to be almost sure it had died. 'Lord Fear would have destroyed me had they not interfered with him.'

'So you owe them their names, huh?'

'I don't really care about penances, but… if I did…' She trailed off and looked up at him. 'It's Elspeth, in case you're wondering. Though it's been years since I used it. And those years don't count as real anyhow, so maybe I don't have any name, to speak of.'

'Better than being named after the thing that likes to take control of you every couple of hours.' Random, pointed out, dryly. 'Elspeth. That's very…' he hesitated.

'Yes?' Her voice came out sounding a little sharper than she meant it to.

'Very… you.'

'Hm. I'll take that as a compliment.'

'Sure. I'll go with that.' Random turned slightly, as best as the tred would allow him on the cobbles. 'Elspeth. It sounds almost human to me.'

'And what about you? I take it "Random Virus" isn't your birth name.'

'The _Random_-Part is… And yeah, I know. The irony is almost crazy, but then it's not exactly a coincidence, is it? Virus…' He frowned for a second. 'I know that it's not my _birth_ name. I don't know _what_ my birth name is. It's never been in anything I've ever seen about the game, and I don't recall ever being given one. I've always been Random Virus, even before... this.'

The game liked to hang around, it seemed, even while it was falling apart.

'There are a lot of things here that have nothing to do with the game.'

'Our memories aren't amongst those things, though, are they?' Random said. 'And memories are what you're made of. They make up an important part of your identity.'

Lady Illusion grimaced, staring upwards at the dull, green and gold sky overhead as an alternative to sighing out loud. 'Please tell me I'm not going to have this discussion again, Random. Memories are better off forgotten now.'

He fell silent for a moment before nodding. 'I suppose it doesn't matter, but…'

But.

The unfinished sentence had enough significance to tide over the silence. It felt strange for them to be sitting here, discussing _names_ of all things, when really, neither of them had one – not names they could be certain of, anyway. It felt strange to be here _at all_. She wondered sometimes about the game and whether or not it had permitted _them_ any interaction together. Very little –she imagined. It wouldn't have been necessary.

That made this conversation something unusual perhaps. Something the game hadn't planned for. No wonder they were always so awkward.

'If memories are who you are,' she said quietly after a moment. 'Then I have memories of this place, Random.'

'You mean the sixth dimension?'

'Yes, but _this_ realm in particular. The Haunted House.' She tapped the wall besides her and accidentally disturbed another cockroach. By the time it had finished screaming at her (if she hadn't known better she would have sworn it was actually trying to insult her), the sky had changed colour into something halfway between light and dark. She'd come to recognize such changes being the remains of the artificial day-and-night cycle of their world. She supposed she shouldn't be down here anyway.

Sparx wouldn't appreciate her absence.

Funny how things worked out.

'How long were you here, anyway? In this house?'

'If fake memories are anything to go by? For as long as I can remember. There were contracts signed somewhere when I was a child. Decisions I wasn't really a part of. It was all very normal for us. Somehow I ended up in the Haunted House and Fear is all I can remember…'

She hadn't intended for Fear to appear anywhere in the conversation but now he had and she found herself trailing off into silence. She _hated _this uncertainty.

'So in other words fear is all ever had. Maybe all you were ever bound you.'

Random Virus had a way of stating the obvious, when he could actually make up his mind. 'Maybe so.'

'Sparx has taken over, then,' Random added, and she thought she heard a trace of bitterness in his voice which would have been better suited to her (not that she _missed_ fear, Zoar forbid), and thought it better to alter the subject.

'The memories aren't what they used to be, they're… tainted somehow. Twisted around. I don't remember much from before we entered the mortal world, but what I do remember is confusing and disjointed.'

'Yeah. Welcome to my world.'

She almost smiled, but didn't.

'Pardon me if I don't stick around. Anyway, when this place falls apart, the memories will fall apart as well, won't they?'

'Maybe,' his expression changed slightly, but it wasn't the same kind of disquieting shift as occurred whenever his evil side took over. 'I never thought about it.'

'Like we said, maybe it doesn't matter anymore. If the memories are all that keep us here…' That thought was almost a happy one. Liberating, in a way. No Haunted House. No House of Illusion. Provided they _survived_ all this…

Where else was there to go? At the moment, the remains of this world was all that any of them had. Even the humans. Even _her_. And to have to stay here…

Lady Illusion pictures Sparx, dressed in her clothing, behaving in ways that remind the Lady of… well. She _knew_ this world now as the mortals had known it. Knew it from the perspective of someone not bound to the Master of Fear Itself. It –And Ace, knowing him, _being_ with him for what had felt like such a short time– had changed things, somehow.

She'd rather face oblivion than another lifetime in this place. She'd rather lose the last of her sanity…

Somewhere in the distance another cockroach's scream was brought abruptly to a halt, either by a zombie or a Harpix diving on it out of nowhere.

'There's more to it than just memories,' Random said, eventually.

'Perhaps there is, but none of it can hold us here. You know there's only one thing that can do that.'

'Yes… I've been thinking about that. The program.'

'_Your_ program specifically?'

'More like in general. How it relates to this world… this _game_. According to Chuck, there's not much left of the program now: it's been breaking down ever since we entered the human world, but somehow I don't think that's why _this_ world is falling apart, do you?'

'No,' Lady Illusion wasn't sure how they had both reached this conclusion, but there it was. The Sixth Dimension had been built entirely out of programs and coding that had to work together in order to survive, and now that coding was falling to pieces around them for reasons none of them knew. She gazed at Random for a moment longer. 'Not really…'

'Sparx is the one who made me think of it,' Random noted after a while. 'I don't know… _who_ she is now. But she's not the person the program meant her to be. She isn't bound by her coding, you know. Not her own and certainly not what used to be yours. She's operating free of all that. _We_ reacted to this world, not the other way around… that's the way the "game" must've worked.'

'So you don't think that this world falling apart has anything to do with the program breaking down? That by gaining freewill, we somehow disrupted the balance that caused this world to die in the first place?'

It had seemed a logical conclusion. One that most of them had considered, but few had dared to suggest out loud. Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom had been a videogame created for children. The Haunted House, the Garden of Illusion and the endless tunnels of the Nevershine mines, Canary Warp… all of these places were little more than manifestations of human creativity.

The Sixth Dimension was just a fabrication. It had never been build to house real people with real personalities and identities. It stood to reason that their gaining sentience, and their steady transformation from unreal to real, had caused them to break away from the game, leaving behind significant gaps which could not be repaired.

But somehow, that conclusion felt… wrong to her. After all, they had so many memories which according to Chuck had nothing to do with what had happened in the game. Films and images about past lives that had never been mentioned in any guide books or _Ace Lightning_ tales. As if Rick had been giving them these memories for other reasons, preparing them, somehow, for an existence in the real world.

She should thank the master Programmer for that. After she had finished destroying him.

'I'm… not sure' Random said. Though lady Illusion had forgotten what her question was. He still wasn't looking at her. He was gazing off in a vaguely eastern direction (that tower _used_ to be to the east, anyway, and that was the way his gaze seemed to be pointed).

'Random?'

'…What in the name of Zoar is he doing?'

He meant Mark.

Lady Illusion _knew_ he meant Mark. She didn't actually have to look around in order to confirm it. She took a moment to remember when she'd seen the mortal last and try and think what trouble he could possibly have caused which in the meantime.

And now the cockroaches were shrieking again.

Yes. Definitely Mark.

* * *

Chuck's line: '_No, dude, I mean the carnival is total bad karma!' Chuck said, waving his hands about dramatically in a way which Mark probably hadn't seen him react in real life. maybe this damn world was rubbing off on them. 'Think about it. Any time we're even anywhere close to a freakin' little dipper or… or a coconut shy we're either coming back from a Life-Or-Death situation or we're about to get ourselves wrapped up in one. This is tempting disaster so much I don't even wanna talk about it_." … is actually very heavily taken from a line on LeDizx's YuGiOh fanfiction "Homecomings". The actual line she used is this: _**"No, you idiot, I mean the airport's bad kharma!" said Jounouchi, waving at their surroundings. "Think about it! Every time we've been anywhere near an airport, we're always just coming back from a life or death situation or we're about to start one. This is seriously tempting fate"**_


	5. Shedding Metal Filings

**Standard disclaimers apply. Certain original characters are the property of various role-players and will be credited as such when they appear.

* * *

**

_"I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws."_

- Friedrich Nietzsche, "_Thus Spoke Zarathustra_".

Four.

**_Location_**: Haunted House Shield-Boundary

**_Date_**: 12/08/07

Naturally, she'd tried to stop him. Perhaps not the smartest of ideas, but the only one truly available to her.

And now he was fighting.

Zoar be damned, he was actually—

'Mark, stop it—!'

Lady Illusion was used to ordering people about. She had been the Lady of this House once, whatever else might be said about her. She was just not entirely used to people not _obeying_ her commands, unless their name was Sparx, and…

And she certainly didn't expect him to _hit_ her –a backhand, barely missing her face and just catching her jaw with a _crack_. It didn't hurt much (it was at the wrong angle to do so) but now he was severely pushing his luck. Insane or not insane, she was going to damage him at this rate. 'Mark!'

'Let go!'

Let go? He might as well have asked a Meta-Harpix not to shed steel filings. 'Giving orders doesn't… _become_ you, human. But stop trying to –run _into_ than thing and I might consider it. For Zoar's sakes, are you _trying_ to rupture the shield?!'

Mark's elbow drove backwards right into her stomach. It would probably have grounded anyone else, but Lady Illusion was not just "anyone". She merely winced and tightened her grip. 'Bad move, mortal. I warn you, upsetting me will be no more a constructive use of your time than ploughing into that shield would be. Now _stop_.'

'No! It's…'

Lady Illusion took a deep breath which she didn't actually need, and made a grab at his face. This was risky, as it meant taking one hand away from him and exposing her side, and right now she had a feeling Mark wasn't really into chivalry right now. He wasn't as fast as she was, however, and the next thing he probably knew she had him face to face with her, his neck gripped in her left hand, right hand clutching the material over his heart.

'You don't actually _know_ what it is you're trying to do, do you?' She asked.

Mark fixed her in as close to a stare as he could apparently manage when she said that. At least he'd stopped trying to fight her off. He was probably aware that she could put those sharp nails of hers right through his windpipe, if she wanted to. 'I'm not… losing it.'

She wanted to believe him, but there were a lot of things that Lady Illusion to believe right now. 'You're forgetting. I saw your nervous system. Be damned if it was working properly. Just because you won't _feel_ any pain doesn't mean it isn't going to destroy you.'

Mark snapped at her with all the anger Sparx had ever felt or let show. In truth it was... slightly unnerving. 'It's not just my head. Lady Illusion it—'

'For Zoar's sakes, mortal…' Lady Illusion tightened her grip. Just for a second and long enough to stir a few pressure points. Mark bolted still, the way people always did when she did that to them. It was a useful technique – good for freezing an opponent in their tracks without doing any real damage. The look on his face changed from angry to confused.

And all of a sudden it was Mark's face again. There were no emotions there now but his own.

She let go of his arms and he all but ripped away from her but didn't keep going for the barrier. By now Chuck was catching up having made a break for it after Mark the second he saw him heading for what everyone knew was currently the "weakest" area of the shield.

Mark whirled around to face her. He didn't run. That was something, she supposes. At least he's still in control enough not to do anything more stupid now…

'You know, don't you?' he said slowly, understandingly. '...I'm _not_ losing it. You know this isn't normal.'

'Define _normal'_ Lady Illusion snapped. Still, who was she to lecture on logic and sanity? 'You don't seem to acknowledge that what you're doing will not only kill you, but everyone else in here. Still,' she stood tall, feeling suddenly embarrassed for revealing something so personal. 'These days I often feel too close to it myself, Mark. Don't let _me_ tell you what's real and what isn't.'

There was a moment of silence as she took her other hand away from Mark's arm, stood back and upright. The fake composure acted as a good mask for her. He didn't move. 'So… so you're not…'

'Going to stop you? No. But if you go out there, boy, you'll die. Again.'

'You'll... you'll let me do that?'

'If that's really what you want, then you have my word,' Lady Illusion said, calmly. 'But there are at least eighty different… people, inside of here,' she paused only briefly on the word "people" –what did such differentiations matter now, anyway? At the moment, she was pretty much classifying everything within the walls that moved as being in some way _alive_ and to Oblivion with the exact details of their composition. 'All relying on that shield. You might kill yourself and not care but what if you break the _shield_ in the process?'

Well. Obviously the look on his face suggests he hadn't thought of that. 'Call me insane, Mark…' she bit her lip (a childish gesture, uncharacteristic. It almost made her feel like him, which was probably the most ridiculous thought she'd had all "day".) 'But I don't think Ace would want you to do that.'

He responded to that bit of logic at least. He didn't _want_ to come away from that wall, anymore than any of them really wanted to be trapped within it, but he did anyway and she was fairly sure that it wasn't just because he was afraid that she'd shoot him if he didn't (though all said and done, she probably would: better to put him out of action before someone got hurt).

'Your friend… Chuck was following. Looks like you managed to lose him in there.'

'Chuck? I can't outthink him…' Mark looks up. He's speaking more evenly now. 'I can outrun him, though.'

'I noticed.'

Mark shook his head, as if to answer a question she hadn't asked. 'You don't get it... there's something out there.'

'Whatever it is it can't b any good for any of our healths,' Lady Illusion responded, with equal force. 'It's not worth risking your life for.'

'So you'd rather sit here? Just stay locked up in that room for the rest of your life?

'The odds are that I won't be. If Sparx...'

'I _know_ why you're here, Elspeth!' Mark snapped, and Lady Illusion... hesitated, almost imperceptively. Mostly because he had never before used her name in such a way. She had never given him true _permission_ to use it, she supposed, that that permission and rules ever mattered to mortals. 'I know why you're not dead, I know why Sparx didn't just... let him kill you. She could've done that, don't you get it? She could've but she didn't and you know why?' lady Illusion stayed silent, mostly because she wanted to hear his answer, to see whether it corresponded with the one in her head. 'Because of Ace,' Mark finished. 'Because... it's not what he'd want. _That's_ why we're alive.'

'I fail to see what that has to do with your suicide attempt,' lady Illusion snapped.

'You don't get it; it wasn't going to hurt me!'

'What wasn't going to?' lady Illusion's eyes narrowed. 'Mark what are you talking about?'

Mark reacted like a child who'd just given away a secret. His eyes fell to the floor, one hand clutching the amulet around his neck. Lady Illusion thought she heard him mutter the word Ace,' under his breath, but had no time to question him on it before he started turning in the direction of the shield again. Lady Illusion forced herself to remain still.

'Uh, Mark?'

'What?' Mark snapped, looking up suddenly, and Chuck flinched just a little.

'Nothing man I just… well that… hole in the shield we were talking about. The one around the back, near where Random is? I… I think we need to go check that out, now. We need to talk about that… issue.'

Mark's shoulders relaxed just enough for Lady Illusion to feel more confident that fists weren't going to be launched in her direction. He didn't attack. She figured that was a positive development and stepped backwards another several feet, folding her arms loosely across her chest. For humans she'd heard the gesture was an angry one, for her people it was one of derision –"_I don't have to worry about you. You're not important_."

Mark turned around sharply and looked at Chuck. His wrist-cannon hand was still clenched tightly into a fist, but Mark wasn't about to shoot at _him_; she could be certain of that, at least.

'Chuck I—'

'No.' Chuck interrupted. 'I mean… yeah, I… I get it, man. But not now, 'kay? It's cool. Just… like going back through the Nevershine Mines. Takes time, but it's worth it, right?'

Mark's expression looked pained and familiar, but Lady Illusion couldn't place it exactly. 'But, I _can't_—'

Chuck's face tweaked uneasily into what Lady Illusion supposed was meant to be a smile. 'What, just like you couldn't kick Anvil-Twin's ass in the Second Hand Carnival on level four? Sure you can, man. It's totally okay. Kid's stuff... But now's not the time for playing with games.'

Mark hesitated. Then nodded, casting one brief, flickering glance at Lady Illusion. She followed the line of his gaze to her arm, where something –likely a piece of metal from the wrist cannon– had cut into her. The cut bled with a faint green light, which shimmered and rose into the air like steam.

'…I didn't mean to do that' Mark muttered, sounding rather surprised and not entirely guilty about it. 'I never thought…'

'Apology accepted,' Lady Illusion said, dryly even though it really wasn't one.

Mark looked away from her and walked straight ahead, away from the shield surrounding the carnival. Chuck's hand twitched for a second, in the direction of the wrist cannon, but he seemed to decide against touching it. Mark was still wearing it as he walked straight around to the left side of the courtyard and the steps. His countenance almost reminded her of Ace, albeit a good deal less impressive.

And still… it didn't feel like _Mark_. Not the Mark she knew, at any rate. '_Perhaps he's right. Perhaps something is happening_. _You're not as insane as he might have you think you are, Elspeth._'

Elspeth.

It'd been a long time since she called herself that, even just in her mind. Lady Illusion continued to stare in the direction Mark was heading for a moment, before slowly averting her gaze back to Chuck. 'What did you..?'

Chuck shrugged. 'He didn't really wanna hurt anyone, you know that, right? And he's no Ace, so it's not like I couldn't have just reinforced the shield again with every layer he bashed through anyway.' He shuffled on the spot, the way he was prone to do when standing before Lord Fear. 'I just… I didn't want him to get hurt while we did it. Too many close shaves for comfort, man. I don't know what happened there.'

Chuck's arms folded across his chest, though he seemed to be neither angry nor contemptuous. More likely… afraid. An endangered mortal, Lady Illusion had learned, would always guard their hearts and stomachs. As if they were the important things to protect. '…He's freaking me out. This whole thing is. More than usual, I mean. But he's alright so long as I can keep him away from that shield.'

So that was it. She should've figured. She wonders how long this has been going on without her noticing. With all the chaos surrounding her own somehow continued existence, she hadn't time to pay attention to the resident mortals. 'Human, just a couple of minutes ago I was attempting to restrain him from threatening to destroy the whole _shield_, not to mention prevent him from _attacking_ me with his bare hands. What did you _say_ to him?'

'You heard what I said.'

'You know what I _mean_, mortal.'

Chuck's tweak of a smile crept up into an uneasy grin but his hands remained wrapped firmly around his chest. 'Hey, that's a Trade-Secret. Lady. Bigbyte Special. Plus, he's Mark,' he looked up at her, as if that explanation was enough. 'You should get back to your room, though, y'know?' he added. 'I don't want Fear to find out you're out here. You'll get in trouble.'

'Nothing I can't handle,' Lady Illusion said, calmly, and couldn't help but feel somewhat put out by the lack of certainly in Chuck's face as she said so.

When she looked back at the steps, Mark had gone.

* * *

**Location**: Haunted House Cellar.

**Date**: 13/08/07

'It was stupid, what you did last night.'

'I know.'

'You could've killed yourself.'

'I _know_…'

'No, Mark, I don't think you _do_.'

He _didn't_ know, Random thought, for once imagining that both his personalities might just be in agreement. Not everything, as it turned out, was an issue of good and evil, strength and weakness...

The mortal really had no comprehension of what it was he had just been doing yesterday when he charged into the shield keeping them alive. Random had felt the shield degrading gradually in a series of small quakes from all the way across on the other side of the Haunted House. He gave it three tremors tops before the left corner of the shield splintered, allowing the broken down world outside to leak in and destroy them.

More to the point, Mark didn't seem to care. That bothered Random, because Not-Caring had never been something he associated with that damn mortal.

Mark kicked a rock which rolled down several steps and clattered to a halt near Random's tred.

'You know you could've caused real damage. That shield is the only thing keeping us from falling part like the rest of this dimension, and it's getting hard for fear to maintain it as it is.'

'That wasn't important at the time,' Mark said, with an air that made him sound almost like Rick. Must be a human thing.'

How about the rest of the people in this Zoar damned building? Are _they_ important?'

'I wasn't trying to break it! I was trying to—'

'Get out?' Random snorted. Amateur mistake. He'd lost count of all the Academy graduates he'd encountered over the years who had thought that they could just _blast_ their way through an evil's defensive shielding, like it was made of the same stuff as their target-practise dummies. 'Those kinds of shields only come down in two ways, kid. Either the person who put them up _takes_ them down (slowly and carefully, one bit at a time), or you smash through them, and that can cause more harm than good. Now, the last time _you_ were capable of creating anything powerful enough to control a building-sized magic-powered shield, it wasn't exactly _voluntary_, and it didn't do my circuits any favours. I don't think it's going to _work_ now somehow, do you?'

He didn't mean to sound sarcastic, but his tone seemed to have the desired effect. Mark didn't answer but at least he'd stopped pacing. The wrist cannon lay on the step nearby. Random pictured the metal of it buckling and cracking, sparking electricity like the last time it'd lain in the dirt. His evil side's desire to kill was no longer there, but the memory of it burned beneath. It burned strongest when Mark was being the most infuriating –the times when he reminded Random of Ace, back in their days at the academy, before Ace had come to appreciate the difference between a simulated training round and a real live battle.

Not that any of them had turned out to be "real live battles" in the end but Random didn't want to think about that right now.

'It seems to be becoming a trend, where you're concerned, amulet infused or not. You just... run into things. You don't _think_, and this time almost everyone paid because of it.'

'You can talk. Why'd you let them _do_ that, anyway?' Mark pointed accusingly at the chain still attacked around Random's tred. He'd already tested it several times. The chains wouldn't hold back either side of him if he tried –wanted– to get free.

'It's a reassurance tactic for Fear's benefit. It won't actually—'

'Stop you?' Mark interrupted. 'Yeah, I know. I've got a feeling he knows, too.' He let out a breath and Random had no idea why that statement seemed to reassure the mortal as much as it did. 'We're wasting time. Anyway, you won't kill us; I'm just expecting that something bigger will.'

Random ground his teeth. 'Get a grip. You're not dying now, kid. Don't act as if you are. And don't act like we're disposable.'

Mark's expression changed. 'I didn't.'

'I know you didn't. But you sure as Oblivion _acted_ like you did.'

Mark paused for a second before sitting down again on the step, reaching out one hand to the wrist cannon. 'The amulet I mean… all that power. I still _remember_ it.'

'Do you wish you still had it?' Random risked asking.

Mark paused for a long while, without answering, and when he eventually spoke, all he said was 'No,' and Random didn't entirely believe him.

The rock which Mark had kicked squirmed and Random saw legs flailing from its surface. There was a croaking hiss; then silence. The creature stopped moving.

'You killed a cockroach,' he said. Mark shifted and Random couldn't work out whether he felt guilty or not.

'They usually stay away from me.'

'This one hardly had the time to consider making an escape.'

'I don't think—'

'They like mortals,' Random finished. 'Yeah, I'd noticed. Most things here don't. Still you won't need to worry about them for long. They're already dying,' he added, on the end. 'The roaches, the zombies… I found three of them reduced to data this morning. And the one Harpix that hadn't already killed itself is gone now, too. The Lightning Moles are restless...'

Mark looked up at him, frowning. Truth be told, Random would have been as glad for the distraction as Mark was, if the distraction in question wasn't so damn scary. 'So that's where it went…' Mark muttered. 'What's happening?'

'Nothing new. I would imagine the power levels here are dropping as the game degenerates. The shields won't hold out forever and Fear's looking for alternative energy sources to keep his power high enough to maintain them.'

'That's why he wanted all the Minions here? Why he gave them…' Mark spat the next word, like it made a bad taste in his mouth. '…Sanctuary?'

'Probably. And he'll want the amulet, Mark,' Mark shuffled. 'I'm willing to bet that's at least part of the reason you're still here. That and Sparx's reluctance to let anyone else die.' He was reluctant to admit it, but Sparx was perhaps the one thing really keeping them alive, right now. Fools. He wasn't _weak_ enough to need her help…

It wasn't his evil side which said that, but Random was starting to get the feeling he'd been a stubborn old fool, even in the days before his accident.

'Thanks for the warning, but I'll be fine,' Mark said, sounding, once again, like Ace had. 'It just...'

'Just what?'

'Just know there's something outside of the shield,' Mark said plainly. 'Something... pulling in the rest of the world. The thing that's destroying it. It's... hungry,' Mark frowned, as if that wasn't really the word he was looking for, but couldn't think of a better one.

'Demon child, demon mother...' Random muttered under his breath. What Lady Illusion had said to him...

'What?'

'...It's nothing,' Random told him, knowing that neither of them really believed it, and that neither would mention it again until it was really necessary. ',...Someone should probably check that Kellamy's still in the dungeon, even one handed, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd found a way out of there by now.'

* * *

**The "demon child, demon mother" phrase was one that was mentioned by Sarah Frost in the part of this Coda which she is writing. I'll be sure to bug her about posting it.** :P 


	6. Sessions

**Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit, however sparse, very much appreciated.

* * *

**

"_The Reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far?__  
__How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes in mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?"_  
- John Barth, "_Lost in the Funhouse_".

* * *

Session.

_They were in the carnival. _

_No. Not the carnival inside the video game (Mark would be surprised if there were anything left of it by now. The carnival in the real world, and this time, it took him longer than usual to work out that he was dreaming again.' _

_That was also when he realised this was the last hour (or more like the last thirty-odd minutes, by now) in which his life was going to be normal. _

_So much for that. _

_His dad had this saying: "if I knew then, what I know now…" and that saying now sprung into Mark's mind as if it had been planted there. Mark wondered vaguely how his choices might have been different. _

_The carnival, Mark noted, was an absolute wreck. Tents had been ripped to ribbons leaving behind nothing but wooden and metal frames and skeletons. The Haunted house looked as if somebody had set a fire inside of it, and the sky was black and starless. There was no grass beneath his feet, not even around the edges of the tents. It looked like a strange mix of the carnival and the junkyard. _

_He'd had this particular dream before. Actually, he'd had it on average twice every month, since the day he met Ace Lightning. It didn't bother him so much anymore. _

_At least they hadn't until Kilobyte had started showing up in it, but he wasn't there right now. There was only Ace, standing next to him, and gazing out at the carnival with a strange, blank expression. _

'_Ace… I don't understand. What happened?' _

_You've got me, kid,' Ace shrugged. 'Something bad must have happened here at some point. I'm not sure what it was, exactly, but then I'm not supposed to. I just play the game, as usual, and see how everything turns out.' _

'_That's not true,' Mark said, quickly. 'Ace, you're not…' _

'_Just a character from a game? Maybe not, kid. But everything's a game, really.' _

_Mark shuffled, unsure what to say. The ground suddenly felt very un-solid beneath him. _

'_Come on, Kid, let's check this out.' _

_He said it in that voice which mark knew he could argue to. The voice he knew he could say no to. But in a dream like this, was there ever really any sense in not sticking with someone you knew while you had them? He knew what dreams were like. If he took his eyes off Ace for even a second, then Ace would disappear and Mark would have to deal with the rest of this bloody dream on his own._

_That in mind, he'd rather not say no. So he followed Ace into the carnival, opening and closing the fist which normally wore the wrist cannon. _

'_We fought Anvil there once,' Ace sad, pointing out a location which had once been the Hoopla stall, 'The first time you used the wrist cannon. You weren't a bas shot for someone who'd never used it before, you know. And there' Ace pointed again, towards what should have been the dunking booth, it's normally brightly coloured contents grey and lumpy, like strange rocks. 'What was where I found out something important.'_

'_Like what?'_

'_Like that you were my friend,' Ace said, simply, as if it were just another part of the game stats. Just another word. Except it didn't feel like one at all and mark almost smiled. 'And then there's Chuckdude... I learned the same thing about him right there,' Ace pointed to the left of the haunted House, near a scattered pile of burned out rubbish bins. 'And I was given my new Flame Upgrades too. Now that was fun.'_

'_Fun?' Mark frowned. _

'_Sure; what, you don't think that having powers is fun?' Ace looked at him, smiling and leaning against a stall which seemed so weak and worn that it should have crumbled beneath him, but didn't. 'I know it's important to stick to the rules, kid, but... sometimes, you don't want to do that. Sometimes you just feel like flying even though it's the middle of the night. And sometimes you feel like blowing things up... destroying them, just because you can. _

_Mark had been about to remark that this didn't make any sense, but then he realised that it kind of did. Like when you were standing on a bridge and considered jumping –not because you were really desperate or wanted to hurt yourself– but because you knew you had the ability to do it. So why not? Only imagining the consequences held you back. _

'_I don't have any powers, Ace.'_

'_Sure you do,' Ace reached out, giving the amulet around mark's neck a tap. Mark decided to conveniently ignore the fact that the amulet shouldn't have been there. According to his watch (which he had to assume was right) the time was half an hour before eight thirty pm on a Sunday night. Half an hour before Ace even arrive in his world. 'You have that, don't you? I know what you can do with it.'_

'_Yeah, but it's...' dangerous. Painful. Nearly killed me. Would've killed Sparx or lady Illusion, too, if they didn't have at least a bit of common sense. _

'_Scary?' Ace suggested, and that hadn't been one of the words Mark was thinking of, but he supposed it was true. 'And yet it's important to you, right?' _

'_The amulet's the only way you can win the game,' mark said, thoughtfully. 'It's the only way that anyone can win it... But they don't tell you that in the guidebook. And they don't mention all the other things you have to have done, too... Like opening all the secret doors in the garden of Illusion, and shooting down the Boat Man in canary Warf... things that seem almost pointless, when you look at the big picture...' he paused, then looked up at Ace, feeling only slightly surprised that he hadn't vanished (this was a dream, after all.) 'The game's not fair, is it?' He asked. 'It's hard to win... almost impossible to win. That's why no one's ever done it.' _

'_No, I guess you're right. It's never been fair, no matter what the people who made it would have you believe. But we have the advantage, really,' Ace added, a little brightly. 'We can come back, always, but you humans... Well, let's just say I wish I'd known earlier how breakable you were.' _

_Breakable. _

_It was a strange choice of word, but accurate mark supposed. He clutched the amulet tightly, recalling the fact that having it should have made him a target –which it had – and yet... it had never killed him. Kind of like a drug, he thought morbidly. You knew it could get you hurt. You knew it was dangerous, but you wanted it anyway. _

'_Well, I'm going to scope out the area a bit,' Ace said, with one last glance around the burned out tents. 'When you work this whole thing out, kid – come and find me. I'll…' he paused. 'I'll be waiting for you.'_

'…_I don't understand.' _

_Ace gave him a small, sad smile. 'That's okay. Neither do I, anymore.'

* * *

_

**_Location_**: The Haunted House Front Court.

**_Date_**: 14/08/07

All in all, there were probably worse places in the Sixth Dimension to be right now.

'Drop it.'

Probably.

Lady Illusion was rising into what must've been a fencing stance, though Mark didn't know enough about that kind of thing to be sure. Blood was leaking green from… somewhere, and she wiped her jaw with the back of her hand. Must've been there. He had no idea how she could manage to do that and still look so… overwhelming –_Scary, really. One of the scariest people you've ever met, even though you forget sometimes. You know how she got to be what she is, you saw the videos. You _know–but apparently she could. Lady Illusion was probably the only person he'd met who could look this sure of herself in _defeat_.

Sparx's sword had been pressed to Lady Illusion's ribs, but now it was pointing in Mark and Chuck's direction and glowing ever so faintly. They'd been fighting. But not like their normal fights. This one had been set within crystal floodlights and Mark could've sworn that there were Zombies, scattering away into the surrounding darkness (_creepy, how they can do that so easily_). A lesson, maybe? (_Who's teaching whom?_) Or a display. Or maybe it just an opportunity for Sparx to let off some steam. Lady Illusion, however…

Well, he doubted Lady Illusion was here to enjoy herself.

'…I… um.'

'You heard me, _drop_ it.'

She couldn't see them. Or at least, she didn't know who they _were_ exactly, and now that Mark thought about it, that was understandable. It _was_ pretty dark all the time these days, and the area in which the others (the _characters_, as his mind still somehow called them, while also trying to remind him that technically, at the moment, he was made of the same stuff as they were… did that make him a character too?) stood was lit by crystal ball-style flood lamps.

Chuck nudged Mark in the chest and it felt like Mark could hear every word Chuck was thinking. '_Dude, seriously, this is _Sparx_. She shoots first, asks questions later and she's only just getting the hang of the questions._'

Mark… still didn't do anything. His mind was preoccupied with getting to grips with what it was he was seeing, trying to work out exactly _what_ that was and who he should be trying to protect, if _anyone_.

…Probably no one.

'Perhaps you should phrase yourself more specifically, angel,' Fear said after a moment that felt like forever (in which time Mark just stood there feeling like an _idiot_ and trying to make himself _say_ something.) 'They don't appear to be getting the point and if it _is_ another Harpix…'

'Yeah. Right. Okay, you. Come out here or else I'll light ya up the _hard_ way. My sword, your gut –or whatever you have– equals meeting of mutual freakin' minds now—'

'Uh, Sparx, dude? Yeah, hi?'

'What the—?'Sparx paused, suddenly seeming to realise her sword wasn't pointed in a very safe direction. She lowered her arm, and as it fell, Mark caught a glisten of green on the blade.

Maybe it was just in his imagination. '…Chuck? Oh, holy _crap_, Chuck, what do you think you're…' Her sword flickered back into light, so she could get a better look at his face. 'Both of you! Man, you _idiots_, I could've wiped you both out!'

'Or at the very least wounded them significantly,' Fear added, and Mark could _hear_ the slightly wistful note in Fear's voice, but had the common sense to keep his mouth shut about it. He was getting good at that.

Sparx didn't appear to notice the sarcasm. Or maybe he was imagining that, too. 'Or that! You kids can't be wandering around out here at night; the Harpix'll rip you to shreds if they get a look at you in the dark.'

'Ah, _Sparx_…' Mark tried not to sound as disturbed as he felt. Because seriously. _What_ had they just walked in on? If he'd been feeling a little braver, he would've mentioned that there weren't actually any Harpix _left_ to rip anyone to shreds –Random had reported finding the last one on the battlements an hour ago, reduced to little more than coding steadily fading into the DataStream, looking for all the world like it's ripped out it's own heart so it could die faster.

Lord Fear probably already knew about that.

'Wha…? Oh, sorry, I was still in stopping-the-bad-guy mode, I guess. It's alright, just… drop that damned shooter or something, will ya? Nobody's gonna get hurt.'

That was when Mark realised he was still pointing the wrist cannon. Oops.

He cast a glance at Fear who remained, for the most part, utterly expressionless. Which was… more bearable than being glared at, sure, but also kind of disturbing anyway. If Fear wasn't sneering then he was snarling, and if he wasn't snarling he was leering, and if he wasn't _leering_ then Ace had probably just beaten him back into the carnival ride he came out of or something else was seriously wrong. Mark was pretty sure that wasn't the case right now, so exactly why Fear was looking at the two of them like that was a mystery, and not one Mark was eager to find out the answer to. Fear was virtually pokerfaced, as if waiting for one of them to make the first move.

'You heard her,' Fear said, after a moment, his face still as blank as a statue. 'Drop the weapon, mortal, I'd rather not have you putting holes in one of the few solid walls remaining in this dimension.'

'Doesn't look solid to me,' Chuck muttered, and when Fear glared at him for it he quickly appraised 'Ah, I mean… well, the walls are kinda fluid, you know? I mean more so than usual. We thought we'd take a look, is all, see what was shaking we didn't mean to…' he glanced uncertainly at Lady Illusion. 'Interrupt.'

'_That's_ what you idiots are doing out here?' Sparx slapped her forehead with her hand, and mark felt amazed that she could be in sparring kill-the-evil mode one minute, and then turn almost gentle when she was talking to Chuck. 'Checking the Zoar-damned _wall's_ for cracks? That's not your job, Chuckdude, we'll deal with that.'

'Well uh, it's not cracks. Not even close,' Chuck said, eventually. 'A crack I would've fixed myself, and not left anything behind. This is more like…'

'Like missing rooms,' Mark finished.

**I had a room once. It broke. **

'Yeah, and gaps in platforms.'

'And windows.'

'And fences.'

'And about half the zombies that were using the courtyard up until today,' Mark said, as calmly as he could.

The response to this last comment was silence, a somewhat puzzled look from Sparx, a glare from Lady Illusion and what must have been some kind of eye-roll from Fear, though with a face like that, it was hard to be sure. Mark decided it would probably be a good idea if he just stopped looking at Lady Illusion altogether. The alternative, of course, was looking at either fear or Sparx. Given the circumstances, you would've thought he'd have opted for Sparx, but no. Fear's eyes glared back at him instead, cold and dry.

'And you thought now would be a good time to investigate these... shall we say, phenomenon?' Fear asked, dryly.

'Um, yeah,' Mark lied, _almost_ fluently. 'I mean, that's why we're out here. It was there this morning, it…' he paused, mentally reminding himself that there were several things which had been there this morning which weren't now. Harpix's, Zombies, Creepy Vine plants, the back wall of the edge of the "estate" or whatever it was called. 'There's a good bit of the _back wall_ missing and…'

**Someone's breaking the stars. **

'The stars are going weird too,' Mark added in a mumble, but Fear seemed utterly unaware of this last comment.

'I'm well aware of the absence of the wall,' he snapped irritably, more so than usual, in fact. 'If anything at least it means you mortals are far less likely to attempt blundering into it as you did when you arrived.'

'Sorry dude, but that _was_ kinda an accident. I mean, we were running from a Meta-Harpix at the time and…'

'And the entire shield nearly came down because you couldn't control your own weaponry. And the Harpix nearly ate you anyway. This is why I want rid of things such as you.' Fear was wearing his "_You mortals irritate me more with every passing second, how long until I can destroy you?_" face. The one which in the old days would've probably been a cue for them to leave as soon as possible. _Except there's not really anywhere far away enough that we could go to avoid him anyway… this is his world now_. He would've laughed at the irony had he not still been feeling so damn nervous.

Staffhead, for his part, remained blank and silent and very much like the utterly inanimate object he should have been. Now that he thought about it, Staffhead hadn't said much _at all_ lately. Not even a quick quip or random insult.

**Maybe someone broke him too. **

'We want them to stay out, is all,' Sparx shrugged, polishing her sword with a sleeve. 'The freaks out there, I mean, and you did kinda run into the shield.'

'What freaks?' Mark asked, sceptically. 'There's nothing _left_ out there to get in.'

'There are a few things,' Lady Illusion said. Mark was slightly surprised by her willingness to speak out, but more surprised still by the fact that neither Fear nor Sparx made any attempt to shut her up. 'We've been glancing outside with the crystals. There are still formations, creatures, even. We believe they may be conscious collections of various others, maybe sentient, maybe not. As for the energy disruptions… those and harder to explain, in particular the larger ones that exist in the region of what used to be the Junkyard.'

'Nobody asked you,' Sparx scowled.

'I performed the divining in the first place,' Lady Illusion said, seemingly devoid of any fear she might have for the women who had, two minutes previously, had her half on the ground with a sword pointed at a dangerous place. 'Stands to reason I could offer the best explanation.'

Sparx snorted, but said nothing. And Mark considered saying something more… important. Something along the lines of exactly how _unsafe_ it was here, and how much they really needed to leave, except that there was nowhere to leave _to_ and…

Damn it, he really _hated_ Rick.

'If you're quite done, mortals, I was rather enjoying this session. As you can probably tell, angel is winning.' (Mark couldn't tell, because lady Illusion was probably the only person in the world who could look like she was winning when she was on her last legs, but he didn't say anything).

'You're not all that concerned that the world is still going crazy, then?'

'Oh, the world is going crazy... well I certainly hadn't noticed that little phenomenon, had you, angel?' (Mark decided he really hated it when Fear got sarcastic.)

'Yeah, he's kinda got a point there, Kid. I mean, define "normal", right?'

Mark flinched only slightly at Sparx's choice of words, but managed a vague smile nonetheless. 'I guess.'

'Good. Glad we've got that sorted. If you guys are done we were kinda busy over here. You gonna pick up your sword, or what?' Sparx asked, though she had turned to Lady Illusion now, and Mark imagined he could hear just a tad more patience in her voice than usual. He also noticed that Sparx waited for Lady Illusion to get into stance before she attacked again. Then the air was all clashing of metal against metal again, and Sparx was obviously still winning.

Chuck took hold of his arm in order to practically pull Mark away from the scene.

'See, dude?' he muttered as they walked away, the clatter of steel and grunts of attack still sounding in their ears. 'Told ya. I think she's developing a dominatrix complex.'

'Developing?' Mark asked, dryly. 'I think it's long since been established, Chuck.'

'Whatever, man, point is we've gotta _watch_ this. They might think the Lady's goin' crazy but you say her back there –hell is gonna rain here within days, I reckon.'

'It's going to rain anyway,' Mark muttered. 'You saw the look on his face, Chuck. I was right, I know I was. He knows about what happened to the zombies. I know how he's keeping the wall up.'

Chuck groaned under his breath. 'I don't know, Mark... maybe their data just eroded so much they vanished. Zombies are virtually falling apart anyway.'

'Chuck, seriously, I'm not just trying to make the situation worse than it already is' mark muttered. Then he paused, as he saw a cockroach sitting on the floor only a few feet ahead of him. His response was instant statue-mod, but it soon seemed not to be necessary. The creature was lying on its back and crackling, obviously dad and being absorbed by the grass around it.

**Dead. Gone to demon nothing. Won't come back. **Something said in Mark's head, and for some reason, mark felt compelled to answer it, if silently. 'No_, it won't come back_.'

**It won't. No. It's silent, because it's dead. No screaming ever again. A good thing?**

'Maybe...'

**Maybe not. **

'See what I mean?' Chuck muttered. 'The cockroaches are breaking down, too... come on, we'll deal with this later, for now I'm going to go get those eight hours we were talking about earlier... Mark? You alright?'

Mark nodded, following Chuck back towards the Haunted House, mutely, but he remembered what Fear had said to him.

Fear had said he didn't want Mark putting holes in the walls, right? And there was no reason for Fear to _lie_ about that –why would he lie about something nobody wanted to do anyway?

And before then, when Lady Illusion had forced him not to run into the wall. It wasn't that she thought he _couldn't_ break through it... If either of them had even _mentioned_ the fact that Mark could have put a hole in the wall… then chances were he probably could.

**Maybe.

* * *

**


	7. Retrospective Imagery

**Please note: From this point, several sections of the story will be written by Sarah Frost as opposed to myself. They're all very mixed up with my own words, so I'm not even going to begin and try and explain to you who wrote what. Some of Sarah's text has been modified slightly, but I tried to keep it as similar to its original form as possible. **

**This chapter features what happened to Sparx just before and after she was sucked into the sixth dimension and before she arrived at the Haunted House with all the other Survivors of the Sixth Dimension's slow destruction. **

**This chapter was written mostly by **_**Sarah Frost. **_

**The Scenes of Mark interacting with Random (the scenes in italics) are written by me.

* * *

**

'_In the beginning was the Amulet of Zoar__,' Sparx knows, '__and I must help my friend Ace Lightning to keep it out of Lord Fear's hands and save the world, sending the villains back into the prison of the Sixth Dimension._

'_I am a Lightning Knight__¸' she knows, but she doesn't know how or why._

_Lady Illusion is evil__, she also knows. __I sent her to prison in the Sixth Dimension, before she escaped, freeing the others. __But there's more to __that__ particular story._

_Battles, fighting, fielding explosions with her sword, fighting as much with words as with abilities, little girl, hair looks like roadkill... __Energy, crashing around them, battles and brightness and flame and darkness._

_It's always been personal…" _

–Sarah Frost's "_Between the Lines_", an Ace Lightning fanfiction.

Retrospective Imagery: Rescuing a Lightning Knight.

_**Location**_: Climbcrag Castle

_**Date**_: 09/08/07

--

It had been fun.

With Rick, that was. Fear was ignoring her too much, and she liked the way the mortal let her be in charge, and it was _good_ to surprise him and get that half-lusting, half-fearful look in his eyes.

And then she'd been too-suddenly wrenched into the Sixth Dimension in a rather embarrassing outfit (simultaneously with Random and the boys, as she'd later found out while trying to save them from so-called _Lady_ Illusion. They'd had to go to the junkyard for safety, and nobody would _listen_[ to her and there had been that thing with Mark and the amulet...

She'd accepted this duel out of pure boredom. It was just Kellamy--he wasn't _dangerous_, she was better than him and they both knew it. She was winning the swordfight, of course she was, and now...

_Fuck_, was her last coherent thought as the zombie brought down the cudgel over her head from behind her.

--

The ceiling above her was off-white, surprisingly clean, and did nothing at all for her throbbing headache. She forced herself to sit up, looking down at herself; the zombie's outfit had even more tears in it — i not that Fear or Rick would have minded, aside from the smell, she couldn't help thinking— and she was sitting on a coarse sheet on top of a bed. It was surprisingly quiet here, for the Carnival.

She strode over to the door and kicked it, letting out a gasp as it refused to budge.

Yeah. Keeping the Knight regulation-issue boots would have been nice, too.

"Let me out!" She hit at it with her fists, not caring about the bruises forming. "I swear, as soon as I get out of here you're going to pay for this, elf-boy! My sword. Your ass. Do the math. And when Random and the boys come around here, it's going to be _you_[ getting hit, in the back or not!"

A small barred window looked out over the maze at which they'd fought, way too far to fall without the Flash; she tugged at it. Not budging. She could break the bed, smash up the walls and rip the stupid white thing someone'd left out for her--push down that cupboard, grasp a long spar of broken wood and rush at the walls with that, use the sheet--wasn't that what you did, make a rope or something? But she couldn't pry out the bars, or smash the damn place down--if she'd had strength superpowers maybe--oh, screw it. Just screw it.

Occasionally he'd hear her screaming at him through the door. She was bored, she hated this, she was going to _kill_ him as soon as she got out, him and Kilobyte both, and all he'd say back was something stupid and meaningless and almost-polite--like anyone who'd done what he did could be --_polite_-- mildly saying that she was welcome to try, or that as soon as Kilobyte changed things _accommodations_ could be made...

Whatever. It had been ages now; days-a week--even with the window she hadn't been keeping track of the exact time and date. And despite herself she'd been screaming at him for powerups, she was losing power, and in the end she only fell on what was left of the bed and just waited...

* * *

At the top of the highest tower, of course. Melodrama would demand nothing else.

She morphed herself into one of the gorecrows that haunted the place, flying up past the traps and divided platforms; this was not the limit of Climbcrag's defences, but her powers would easily get her past this particular aspect. Wards guarded the towers above the floating platforms; she landed on the roof she wanted, transforming into an even smaller creature, and searched for a way through. A loose tile in the roof at last gave her what she wanted, and a small spider painstakingly made its way through the small spaces and into the tower itself. She carefully slipped in, taking care not to touch any of the toxic padding that insulated the roof, or set off any protections. She contorted the small body to crawl out through a miniscule crack in the roof, prepared for whatever would form a next obstacle…

And waited as the zombie guards trudged down the hallway, for the first signs of a minion alert. No doubt Random Virus would be expected; she had no doubt he would survive whatever Kellamy had the resources to throw at him, but his frontal attack would never arrive here without…unexpected assistance.

Always assuming, of course, that the Virus remained resolved; but either of his moral states would willingly attack, the one to destroy and the other to rescue.

She waited, perched in the corner of the passageway as a guard lurched past her for the thirty-second time, stretching her small legs as best she could; the shape felt confining, and she resented the reason behind her presence here.

The guard passed by yet again; uncertain thoughts of _would she have to do this on her own? Excusable, perhaps, to leave it alone…_ ran through her head. _Thirty-nine, forty, forty-one…_

And then, noises in the distance finally became audible, yelling and explosions; _at last_. The zombie guard seemed to hesitate; someone called to him from a doorway. Evidently they needed all the backup they could get. He hesitated, glancing towards the sealed door, and it was then she chose to act; before he could so much as turn around, she had soundlessly materialised behind him and knocked him out with a crystal ball. She carefully aimed two more, filling the corridor with smoke and hopefully delaying the alerts, before targeting the cell itself.

The heavy door finally burst open after three explosions had shaken it, and lying on a small broken cot inside was the enemy she'd come to rescue, flickering slightly and apparently undisturbed despite the noise and smoke.

This could be...slightly inconvenient. She cursed; she should have remembered that Knight power sources were scarce enough on the ground here, let alone the likelihood of granting them to a prisoner.

"Wake up. You fool," she added, shaking her roughly.

"Wha?" Sparx moved, finally, her eyes slowly opening.

"Rescue party. You're coming with me." Lady Illusion pulled at her arm, trying to drag her off the bed.

"_Rescue_? You're…evil…" Sparx flopped out of the bed, spreading herself over the ground like overcooked poached egg.

"Yeah. But better me than Kellamy, right? Come on."

"Yeah. You know he tried to give me a _dress_? 'Cause of the stupid zombie outfit?" Her right hand bunched around the material of the white shroudlike garments wrapped around her. "Bastard. Hate stuff like this."

"Shut up." Lady Illusion pulled her to her feet. "And learn to run in that thing or I'll rip it off you."

"Don't…you…dare." Sparx struggled to stand, leaning heavily on the other woman. "Zoar, as soon as I get my powers back I'm going to…"

"Save it, Sparx," Lady Illusion commanded. "It's time we were out of here."

"I'm coming. Get some patience," Sparx said thickly as she staggered with her out of the door. "Hurts like _oblivion_. Need power."

"Shut up, or I'll drag you by the hair instead."

"You wouldn't dare," Sparx muttered, but fell silent as she was pulled into the smoke-filled hallway.

"…Crap."

* * *

Random Virus was almost… in his element, in a way he didn't really want to think about as he flung screaming zombies across the battlefield. It looked like the big strategy had simply been to mob him; he'd have been expected to try at some point to attempt to rescue Sparx either on his own or with the mortals. He had to admit, as he hit yet another zombie into the lava lake below, that it wouldn't have worked without Lady Illusion's backup.

Assuming she _was_ helping. Or wasn't in any kind of trouble.

He kept such thoughts to himself as yet another zombie ran towards him with its rough lance raised.

* * *

**_Location_**: The Haunted House Lower Courtyard.

**_Date_**: 13/08/07 (Present).

'_So that's what you were doing?'_

_Random had to admit the kid looked rather... speechless, as if he didn't know whether to be surprised, amused or appalled. Which was odd. Random would've thought nothing much could surprise the mortal by now, much less amuse him. 'While me and Chuck... while we were trying to get through the Nevershine Mines _alive_ and... and facing down creepy living shadows that were impersonating Lightning Knights so we could rescue Sparx from Kellamy, you were _already_ rescuing her like, _ten_ minutes ahead of us?' _

'_Well what did you think? That she just... magically escaped and spirited herself to the Haunted House before you got there? That's Illusion's department, kid.' _

'_Speaking of her, when _did_ she get here?' _

'_I'm not entirely sure,' Random admitted. 'But she was there to help me rescue Sparx. She disappeared as soon as Lord Fear showed up to join the fight against Kellamy, and I didn't see her again until after we arrived here. I suppose she must've... jumped around a lot. Moved from place to place, trying to stay ahead of the collapsing world.

* * *

_

**Location**: The Haunted House Lower Courtyard

**Date**: 12/08/07

He didn't actually mind the chains (At least everyone was _safe_. Theoretically), but the zombies he could do without, them and the rest of the minions who leaked in and crowded the courtyard and yelled things at him and tried to sneak up from behind. Idiots.

Still lashing out a few times, and Sparx' influence, had helped.

Random didn't know what was happening out there, beyond the shield Lord fear was maintaining over the carnival. Only that it had forced them out of the junkyard. He supposed it was just lucky for the mortals that Sparx had patched things up with Fear, as awful as it was to contemplate one of your best friends' shacking up with the evil overlord as a i _good_ /i thing. (He wasn't going to think about the time she'd kissed him instead, either.)

The nights were cold, and on this one, he was attempting to reroute his circuits to allow himself i _some_ /i warmth, and trying to ignore zombies snoring and his own thoughts. So the Sixth Dimension was in a mess. It had been a game anyway. He tried not to think about the recovered memories, six, seven, ten, fifteen percent, his family and friends, old engineer Bolt and Triskaelion the master fuel-junkie, the time his engineering squadron had run into those chitterbots in the Third Dimension and run emergency repairs on a single-jet engine, the first mission with Harper in charge and the silver-spined ship that sounded like music when you fiddled with the engines…

A zombie shambled into the courtyard from under the arch, its tattered clothing blowing around it. It didn't stop as it approached him, and he supposed he could appreciate the distraction.

"Please don't do that," it said in entirely the wrong voice for his shape.

Entirely the wrong tone for the voice, too. He lowered his claw.

"What's—"

"I had to come back here," Lady Illusion said rapidly. "It's out there, it's destroying everything, I tried all the morphs I could and I could not escape—"

"We noticed," Random said, but she continued.

"You should know this," she continued wildly, almost loud enough to wake the sleepers around them. "I may not have Ace's emotions, but I am not without feeling, and the tempest hungers for the one it needs, like demon child calling for demon mother, razing the ground as its winds scorch sand to iron, the neverending monster devouring its own stomach—"

She closed her eyes, wrapping an arm around herself in protection. "I apologise," she said. "That was…illogical. I suppose it's a programming error."

Random raised an eyebrow. "That's what I thought. Incidentally, are you all right?"

"Yes." She sat down next to him, slumping against the wall. "Tired. I…don't know what's going on."

"Join the club," he said. "Do you want me to tell Mark what you said?"

"No. You'll get him in trouble with Lord Fear—" She broke off, looking across at his chain. "What did he do to i _you_ /i ? You want out?"

"No," he said. He could…divert the conversation. Let this be talked about. "The mortals are here, Sparx and a lot of others. I could hurt a lot of…people, and possibly make this area of the dimension as unstable as the others."

_Calculations: 33.8798 percent chance of sufficiently disrupting Lord Fear's efforts to allow the dimensional instability to build to critical point, 26.9895 percent chance of injuring or destroying a mortal, a 15.6438 percent chance of injuring Sparx on the assumption that she can fly out of reach, rising to 95.6784 percent if the former occurs and she is present…_

He shut off that mechanical part of himself. He needed the heating sensors, anyway.

"Very noble of you," she said. The usual acerbic tone was back in her voice, apparently attempting to bring herself back to normalcy. "And by i _noble_ /i I mean utterly i _foolish_ /i . Lord Fear will use you again."

"He's keeping us safe. For now," Random said. He closed his eyes. He didn't trust Fear any more than she did, and yet there was i _Sparx_ /i . "I don't think I have anything to worry about. Last time my evil side attacked him as well."

"Optimistic." She scowled; the disdain seemed inappropriate for a zombie's face, too subtle. "I…think I need sleep. Do you mind if I remain?"

"Go ahead," he said, and watched the zombie almost instantly lose consciousness, too close to him for safety. Possibly she thought him a better option than the other creatures, or was simply too exhausted to care.

It was not for six days after that she was at last discovered…

* * *

**_Location_**: The Haunted House Lower Courtyard.

**_Date_**: 13/08/07 (Present).

'_...And of course, you already _know_ what happened after she was discovered here,' Random ended. Mark nodded. _

'_I don't suppose Lady Illusion is too crazy about that... owing a _debt_ to Sparx, I mean.' _

'_yes, well... I suppose she gets some satisfaction from the fact that Lord Fear is also making her wear his one-time Lady's old clothes.' _

_Mark smiled the smile of someone who knew he shouldn't _really_ be smiling at all, but couldn't help himself. 'She does look... kind of weird, doesn't she?'_

'_Let's just say I _preferred_ the uniform.'

* * *

_

**_Location_**: Haunted House Main Chamber

_**Date**_: 11/08/07

Having Lady Illusion turn up one day wasn't _that_ big a deal.

She'd usually gone off on her own before they'd all gotten to the Haunted House, leaving the junkyard for ages and ages to morph off somewhere. Lucky her, being _able_ to blend in everywhere, and thank Zoar she hadn't insisted on hanging around then. Probably the longest time that Lady Illusion had ever been back for was when she'd dumped off Kellamy as a prisoner (and _that_ had totally worked out, yeah right).

And now here she was again, with a two-legged Bunyip either side of her and her hands tied together, brought into the main hall or the court-room or whatever you called it, with Fear sitting in his chair on the main dais and her beside him.

Not really how she'd have wanted to meet the Lady again. A battlefield would've been better, a fight once and for all—but hey, she supposed it was a bit of a reversal of where they'd been before, and she could be _exactly_ as merciful as the Lady had been to her.

He stood up, with Staffhead ready. "So the traitor returns at last," he said. "This time in my power—"

"Screw the long speeches," she heard Lady Illusion say, viciously. "Mark, if you see Ace again, please—"

"If _you_ see Ace again." Mark, actually doing something so's the evils would notice for once. "He's not going to destroy you, Sparx made him say that he'd let us stay—"

"Yeah. Uh, dude?" Chuck asked, looking kind of nervous but saying it anyway. "The whole thing with Ace, old news, a dimension ago…right?"

"She's a traitor who dared to show her face where she betrayed." Lord Fear went down, going towards the woman. "As the ruler of the Haunted House—can you honestly expect me to do anything other than destroy her?"

The staff cackled. "'E'll even be generous an' make it quick. How's that, mortals?"

"Dude. I've been helping you stabilise the coding for the Haunted House. I could not do it if you—"

"Then don't assist me," Lord Fear said, smiling. "Let your i _other_ /i acquaintances die."

Sparx sighed.

' _Completely _pointless,' a part of her wanted to scream out, _'can't you just forget about Lady Illusion, she _did_ betray him and she tried to kill me, she's not your friend and I _am_...'_

"Blast her, m'lord," the staff advised. Sparx looked at her; not perfect-Lady-Illusion now, tattered and torn, her sleeves ripped to pieces. She could probably turn back that sneer, '_didja rob a zombie for that outfit?_'

...Oh. Wait. Sparx looked down at herself.

Man, that was almost _humiliating_.

"Fear?" Sparx said, walking up to take his arm. "I wanna favour. If she can sew, maybe she could, you know…work for me, make clothes?" She tugged a bit on her bodice (well, most likely it had originally been _Lady Illusion's_ bodice, and wasn't that thought just peachy and she really wished someone'd bothered to tell her).

There. That was something he might listen to, and it didn't matter that the boys were looking at her in weirdly. "_Please_? Promise you won't destroy her while I want her help?"

"You want her as a maid." Fear actually smirked. "Hmm. That may be quite fitting."

"What did we discuss before on not listening to women when they get like this—"

"Shut up." He lifted his hand to wrap around Staffhead's mouth.

"She doesn't have anywhere to escape to," Sparx said, twining herself around him. "And hey, Mark and Chuck won't give you a hard time about it, and I really want something else I can wear…"

After extensive washing. Zoar, she had to be really desperate to think about wanting Lady Illusion's things, but gah, if it was this or steal from a zombie…

He sighed. "If I must, angel. For_ now_."

"You won't destroy her or let someone else do it, 'less you tell me first?" Sparx asked. "She's _my_ archfoe, you've got Ace and Kilobyte and it's not fair if you just do it…"

"All right." She felt his hand cupping her under the chin. "I promise I won't have her destroyed—without telling you."

"Thanks." She grinned. Maybe this'd lead to some fun, later on. Good.

For now, anyway.

Fear looked down at the woman in disgust. "Imprison the Lady in her old quarters," he said. "Allow only Sparx to pass. If she escapes, anyone in the least responsible will face her penalty. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, Lord."

* * *

**_Location_**: Haunted House Lower Courtyard

**_Date_**: 13/08/07

'_There's probably not much left out there, is there? It's all been taken in by the Nexus.' _

'_The Nexus?' Random repeated, curious. _

'_Oh, that's what Chuck's been calling it. The heat of the Sixth Dimension, the point that everything is collapsing upon. Chuck told me stories about... spiral universes. Everything branches out from a single point. Our world is a spiral universe: the real world. Chuck thinks that maybe... that maybe this videogame was based on a spiral too.'_

'_...Oh-kay.' He hadn't even been aware that mortal children were taught universal theory. _

'_I never said that it made any sense,' Mark muttered. Then he paused. 'But it kind of does, right? I mean... in a weird way.' _

_Five cycles. _

_They had been trapped here for five cycles, (though it felt like infinitely more) and the both of them were only just beginning to sort out what had happened to them all since Rick zapped them into the Sixth Dimension. _

_At some point they had all arrived at the Junkyard, which had, at the time, been one of the few remaining areas of stability in the entire Dimension. The Junkyard was probably gone now, too – torn to shreds by the force of the Nexus, as mark called it0 The Haunted House remained, as did a few scattered places outside, but everything they had ever known had been ripped apart by now. The dimension folding in on itself, destroying itself. _

'_You know, you wouldn't have gotten into that mess if you'd waited a few damn minutes first. You must've set out to find Sparx only half a 'kril before me and Lady Illusion, and took a different route. The next thing we know we're back at the Junkyard, you and Chuck are nowhere to be seen. It's ridiculous, really. We were trying to rescue the same person. If you hadn't rushed off like...' (An amulet infused idiot) '...Like an impulsive mortal...' _

_Mark managed half a smile. He could do that now, Random supposed. Which was only slightly ironic. Most of his time here Mark had spent pretty much terrified, butnow, sitting in front of the cyborgs with a mental complex that could –probably would, shouldn't, might– kill him, he seemed practically calm. '...Better late than never?' _

'_Yeah, tell that to Sparx when we ended up having to go back there to get the two of you out of the mess wed just pulled her out of.' _

_It gave her the opportunity she wanted, though,' Mark said, and paused a moment before answering the question in Random's eyes. 'A chance to get back at Kellamy.' _

'_Oh. Yes... that. He's still...?'_

'_In the dungeon. I think.' Mark bit his lip. 'I don't think he'll be duelling for fun anymore.' _

'_He kidnapped her, Mark,' Random said firmly, privately thinking it was a little late to start developing sympathy for the enemy. 'Tricked her like a coward. Would've left her to die of starvation in that room if we hadn't gotten to her first.'_

'_I don't know about that...' Mark was frowning intently, seemingly at the step he was sitting on. The expression on the mortal's face almost reminded Random of Ace Lightning. 'Kellamy is a lot of things, Random but I don't think he's a murderer.' _

'_Kilobyte is. And you heard what Kellamy said: "whatever get's my fee paid"._

'_Something tells me he won't be getting a payout on that fee any time soon.' _

'_Hm.' The loss of a hand... Random supposed that he would know all about things like that. His claw clicked almost entirely on its own accord. _

_He looked up – into the shield that surrounded them, the nearest wall less than fifteen metres away, it's golden surface dim and pale in the shadows and growing darker where it touched the ground. Even most of the carnival, which had once surrounded the Haunted House, now lay outside of the shielding, the shadows of it barely visible through its golden surface. _

Ace Lighting and the Carnival of Doomwithout_ the actual carnival... it was a bizarre thought. _

'_And then while you were rescuing Sparx...' Mark went on. 'And... Chuck and me were trying not to you know, _die_ in the Nevershine Mines, Lord Fear was getting ready to follow us into the game?' _

'_So far as I know. He'd be pretty damn annoyed since Sparx disappeared.'

* * *

_

**_Location_**: The Carnival of Doom (Real World).

**_Date_**: 09/08/07

Lord Fear's first impulse had been to anger.

'_Fool! How can she do this to me!'_

It was closely followed by outrage.

'_And why am I the last to know?_'

Had there been a deliberate conspiracy against him, somehow between Kilobyte, the Lightning Knight and his lying Lady, and the Master Programmer? His usual paranoia attempted to form connections between the four, but stopped as he realised that wasn't the _point_.

It was far more important to retrieve Sparx from the grip (_not literally, or else he'd make sure to torture the elf before destroying him_) of the minion, and then he would see about the destruction of Kilobyte.

He changed his form to smoke; the Master Programmer's expertise had indeed been most useful to him, and he had considered some time ago how this ability could best suit him in remaining hidden from Kilobyte. There was a way for him to realize the required rescue, and, considering how long he had already been delayed, there was no time to waste.

Where did the mortal brat keep his computer?

* * *

The computer, conveniently left open on the brat's desk. He evidently hadn't been back quite long enough to return to it. How very useful.

It was not that Lord Fear was especially well informed in this particular area other than what he had gained from mortal television, but aware of the facts of his creation he would be more than capable of proceeding in this scheme. If one truly wanted something done, after all, the answer was invariably to trust it to oneself rather than foolish or traitorous minions.

As intangible smoke, Lord Fear passed into the circuits of the machine, phasing himself into the Sixth Dimension.

And to think –normally he'd have been doing his level best to stay _away_ from the wretched place...

* * *

**_Location_**: Haunted House Lower Courtyard

**_Date_**: 13/08/07

_'And now?'_

_Mark sounded like he really wanted an answer to that question, but it was nothing Random could provide. _

_'Now we're here, whether we like it or not, and I'm pretty sure that none of us do. Except possibly Fear.'_

_Mark looked at a cockroach sitting on the steps a few feet away from him. It shifted a bit, but that was probably a stiff breeze, or something. It was obviously dead. Still, at least it wasn't screaming. 'We were thinking about that...'_

_'While out in the real world, Kilobyte has everything wrapped around his tentacle,' Random muttered, shuddering slightly at the analogy._

_'I'm kind of worried, about Ace.'_

_'You shouldn't be,' Random said, trying to feel as sure of that as he imagined he sounded. Not that he was ever certain about anything. 'If Kilobyte had managed to destroy him, Ace would have been here by now.'_

_'Not if he landed somewhere out there,' mark muttered. 'Not if...'_

_'Not if what?'_

_'...It's nothing.'_

_'I see...' Random rolled back a little, narrowly missing a lazy Zombie who had been muttering to himself behind him. 'The same "nothing" that made you run into the shield yesterday?'_

_'I've already told you what I can about that,' Mark shook his head. 'I'm not going crazy, Random.'_

_'Maybe not... but take it from someone who has experience, kid. Insanity tends to creep up on you when you're not looking.'_

_Mark raised an eyebrow, oddly calm. 'Yeah, thanks. I'll remember that the next time I start hearing voices.'_

_Random snorted under his breath, watching as ripples of orange power fluttered across the surface. Fear was renewing the shield again._

_'...How many less Zombies are there down here than there were yesterday?' Mark asked, seemingly casually._

_'Half as many from what I can see... Fear's been taking them away. I think we all know where he's getting the power to keep this shield going. You still have the amulet?'_

_'Never let it out of my sight,' Mark smiled, a little dryly._

_'Good. Don't. It's the biggest source of power in the dimension right now, and it's hanging around your neck kid. Fear get's hold of it and there could be trouble.'_

_Mark said nothing to that. Just tucked the amulet piece back under his shirt and pretended to watch the shield glittering. Random had the feeling that both of them were trying not to understand what was keeping it up there in the first place, with the entire Sixth Dimension falling apart all around them.

* * *

_


	8. Ladies of Illusion

**This chapter is mostly written by **_Sarah Frost_**, and is again a take on events within the Haunted House at the present time. The ending two parts are mine.

* * *

**

"_The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear" _

–H.P. Lovecraft

Ladies of Illusion.

Too bad the Sixth Dimension was apparently eating itself from the inside.

That was what Chuck said was happening anywhere. He said that by now half of the places they had walked and flown through to get to the Haunted House in the first place had pretty much been swallowed up by... something. Whatever is was out there beyond the shield.

Not that she appreciated being this closed in but it was... kind of nice. Fear spent time with her, and the boys didn't go on about Not-S—Lady Illusion as much as they used to.

Course, there was _still_ Lady Illusion, and that was bad.

But at least Fear was paying attention to her again. That was good, and he was keeping the Haunted House together and letting the others stay, but…

It wasn't the _same_, anyway. She still liked him an' all (they were even, he'd lied and she'd done stuff with Rick, so they'd made up when she'd come back with the others and it was okay now), but she couldn't quite ignore…some things.

Like Random in the courtyard with a chain on his wheel going into the wall. Fear_ said_ he didn't really have a choice and didn't want him going crazy and destroying everyone, and she could kind of see the logic there and Random had said grimly that he understood, and she was helping keep the minions from annoying him by threats and the occasional beating, but it…okay, it wasn't the best thing for him.

Or Kellamy, stuck somewhere in the dungeons. Fear didn't want her to see him, and it was sort of nice that he was still jealous of other guys. But let's face it; the elf-dude seemed _scared_ of her if anything (maybe she shouldn't have made him try to spar with her? He'd _kidnapped_ her first, so they were totally even no matter what anyone thought about it, and he was useless anyway without a right hand so she was _glad_ they didn't have to hang out any more).

At least the boys were pretty much free to traipse around the House. Chuck actually getting along with what he called the "evil overlord dude" was... sorta scary, and Mark just kind of looked permanently terrified. Well, if he wasn't going to try and be brave...

And at least she had clothes that weren't zombie hand-me-downs or that stupid white thing Kellamy had lent her while she'd been imprisoned. It didn't quite fit, though. A red thing that laced up too tightly, like it had been made with someone a little smaller in mind, but tight did…interesting things to her boobs, and Fear seemed to like it.

Yeah. She was thinking a bit more about what _he'd_ like lately, and it was weird, 'cause she'd told him from the start she wasn't going to promise anything. But he was keeping them safe and stuff, and _man_ she wasn't even missing Rick so much anymore. Maybe she should go catch up with him, work off a bit of energy if he was in the mood. Get rid of the ache in her stomach and the tension between her thighs. Yeah. Hey, it was more than just something to do.

There was a routine going on. Fear would go out early in the mornings to renew the safeguards and keep the rest of the dissolving Sixth Dimension from infecting them, and Sparx tried not to think about how she missed the rest of the world or how they were going to get back to the mortal world, as she got up as late as she could and did some training down in the courtyard with the minions, and then they'd get the afternoons to themselves unless Fear had to sort out something between the minions and she'd try to convince him to stay up as late as possible, and he needed less sleep than her so that was all good, and that was all…fine.

Sparx hadn't really looking forward to the conversation with the boys afterwards, but that was okay 'cause it'd lead to her having a really good time with Fear. (She wasn't sure how it was supposed to work. He'd done her a favour, and then it'd still been fun for her. That was a bonus, she supposed. It was neat they were compatible 'n all, and he laughed at her and said she was _indefatigable_, and possibly _irresistible_ on top of that.)

So talking to them would be okay, really. She was in a good mood.

* * *

"Hey, guys. Sorry I'm late, we were kind of busy. He can still do stuff with his mouth, and it's…"

Chuck looked horrified. "Information overload! Remember what we discussed, Sparx. You were already hanging off him before and, well…"

"Whatever," she said. "So, you guys wanna go up to the attics again?" There was some interesting stuff in there, weird musical instruments and random, twisted stoneplants, and even a ghost or few that she'd used as target practice.

They exchanged glances. "About Lady Illusion," Mark said. "I—um, it's great and all that you wanted her to live, but I'm not sure Ace would want to hear about her being your maid…"

She rolled her eyes. _Still talking about Ace like he's my stupid _father_ or something._ "Oh, c'mon. Like Fear would just let her go! She didn't just lie to him, she was going to let Ace destroy him and she'd have been _happy_ about it. Of course she's gotta do something to make up for it."

Mark grimaced. "I still don't know…"

They were her and Ace's friends, not Lady Illusion's. "Yeah, well, there's nothing I can do about it. Let's get a move on here, I'm bored."

Mortals just didn't get these things.

* * *

Sparx shoved open the door after passing the guardian –a giant spider with a human face bobbing on top of it (ironic, Sparx would bet that the Lady wasn't pleased about one of her ex-minions doing that)– and scowled at her long-time foe, quietly _reading_, on a narrow bed done in _pink_. Her costume had been repaired, sleeves sewn neatly up.

"Hello, Sparx. Mind if I ask the reason for the change of opinion?"

Sparx glared at her. "What change? And have you done what you were _supposed_ to do?"

"Yes." Lady Illusion went to the closet, pulling out two dresses. Purple and grey, stupid long skirts. Whatever. "You blasted me here in the first place, and then we fought, there was an incident with the amulet, the mortal got stupid and the fight ended," she said, summarising those incidents rather poorly in Sparx' estimation. "I'm rather surprised that you saved me."

"You could thank me," Sparx said.

Lady Illusion shrugged. "Would it mean that much?" She threw the clothing across. "Tell me if they don't fit, by the way. I'm not particularly fond of sewing."

"How'd you work on them in the first place? Shouldn't you have, like, measured me and stuff?" Right, the purple material felt okay, and it looked closer to her size.

But still, this was _annoying_… Talking to her was annoying. Not knowing what was going on in her freaky spider-legged _head_ was annoying...

"I morphed you." A crystal ball appeared in Lady Illusion's hand. "I can still use my powers within these confines, in case you were wondering. I just can't get out."

"So you wanna pick a fight?" Sounded better than just hanging around doing nothing all day.

"No," she said. "It might be unwise."

"All right." Sparx scowled. If not for the kind of fight that'd probably get the guard sounding the alarm, she'd have more to say, though Fear'd probably approve of her beating Lady Illusion up. "Anything _else_, Lady? What's it feel like working for _me_ for a change?"

She actually smiled at that. "What's it like to parade in hand-me-downs?"

Sparx flushed. "Shut up," she said. "I'll be back in a couple of days. Do what you're supposed to."

* * *

Lady Illusion was sewing, _being an obedient prisoner_, she didn't want to think, when he appeared through the walls.

Of course, she was going to fight back.

You couldn't _hit_ someone intangible. But they couldn't hit you either, and with the right kind of timing…

Lady Illusion flung herself to the side as the first blast lanced through the air. She could smell burning feathers. And there was more smoke; Lord Fear had disappeared again.

A crystal ball materialised in her hand as fast as thought; she threw it in his rough direction, smoke spilling out so that it'd hide her too. The wall was at her back. She jumped away from it; she'd always been fast. Faster than him, and...

And still trapped here, no matter what she did.

* * *

She looked kind of pale the next time Sparx dropped by, just sitting on the bed not doing anything as she leaned against the wall, and the room looked like Anvil had been set loose in it. Splintered closet, marks on the ceiling, heavily scuffed floor--_I can still use my powers_, she'd said, and it looked like that was what had happened. The book she had been reading was lying on the floor, half its pages burned away.

Sparx saw her start at the sudden entry, stilling as she recognized her.

"What the oblivion have you been doing? I don't think Fear'd have left a loophole that you could just beat down the walls," Sparx said. She chucked the red dress at her. "I want it a bit looser, but not that much." Fear had seemed to like it as was, better not to make too many changes.

"Fine. I'll do it."

Sparx studied her. Yeah, she looked kinda…off. "So what'd you do?" she asked. "The place didn't get like this on its own…"

"Call me a coward," Lady Illusion said, and laughed. "Temporary fit of insanity, of course. Like old times, back in the mortal world."

Yeah, she _had_ had those moments, either insane or lying to everyone like she always did. About Sparx's boyfriend.

"What's the matter this time?" Sparx asked. "Worried that I've got what you used to have, more, because he actually chose me, and—" She looked around at the room. "This place was small even without all the mess, you must've been just a minion with this, my room's bigger—"

"I didn't want him!"

The slap was too loud. Sudden. Sparx rubbed her cheek.

"I wish you all happiness. I don't care about either of you. I want to leave this place, get _away_ from…"

"You really sound insane," Sparx said.

She took in a deep breath. "Yes," she said. "I…wish I could kill you now."

Sparx clenched her fists. She didn't punch her back. "Whatever," she said.

She…remembered. The upgrades.

"I don't like you," she said. "And I'll make sure you get what you deserve."

She walked out.

* * *

He was busy playing the organ, humming to himself –out of tune, but she never said that and it wasn't like it really mattered. Like those music classes back at the (not real never happened) Academy had ever done her any good.

He occasionally said his practice was suffering thanks to her, but that didn't matter. She threw herself on his lap, flinging his hands from the keys as Staffhead made a rather pointed noise.

"What's the matter, angel?" he asked her with a sigh.

"I'd like you to leave her alone," she said. "You like _me_, right?"

"What in the world are you—"

"Don't play dumb," she said, wriggling impatiently. She could imagine what might've happened, something passing through the walls, the fight that hadn't ended just 'cause one of them was a prisoner, overlord stuff and all that. "You've got the smoke upgrade, you pass through walls, I saw what her room looked like—"

"I see." He put an arm around her waist. "You have to understand, my dear. She betrayed me."

"And you're supposed to want me now!" The stool overturned, sending them both to the ground.

She needed him _not_ to care about that woman enough to want to even taunt her a little, needed him to want _her_ and for them to skip straight past the upcoming argument and get to the making-up part, which was always more fun—

"I want you. I didn't destroy her for that reason." He reached up to her face, tracing her cheek. "Don't you understand that I loathe the treacherous Lady, and would much rather you?"

"So you hate her." Sparx shuddered as his other hand reached under her dress, barely hearing Staffhead's disgusted sound.

"Yes. Did you imagine differently? This has nothing to do with the more nauseatingly positive emotions, only the remnants of betrayal. It doesn't have to be the same thing…"

It almost hurt, him thrusting inside her, but at the same time his thumb was touching her in ways she liked and his fingernails light on her neck almost drove her mad.

"Leave her alone!" she said again. She gripped his shoulders. "Promise me you'll do nothing, it's got to be you and me don't stop that please—" She hated Lady Illusion too, and it was that as much as anything else that drove them, the want and the hate and the _action_.

Tangled in his arms, she fell over him, her mouth meeting his almost frantically, salt-blue blood in her mouth as his skull scraped her, and the pain was as exhilarating as a battle and the spike of pleasure passed through her like a storm, and almost screamed with it all. "It's _me_, I want you to leave her, let's—"

"Yes,' he breathed. "You've more than made your point. Of course I'll destroy her later, but in the meantime—yes. I should hardly waste the effort." He cackled. "You have my word, angel."

"But, my lord—"

"Silence, staff. Leave us alone."

It was working out. Sparx flung herself on him as though she was trying to bind them with her flesh, losing thought to action. She liked that.

* * *

A boring old history book.

Another boring one, sappy romance.

Sparx picked up and flicked through the first one again, in case there were any _exciting_ stories. _In 238 in the year of the Lord Zoar, the philosopher Lenard Fountain published his work _Gloriosa Profundis…

_In 909 AZ, in the city New Third, the ancient spirit called Tristane arose, and took the hearts and minds of the city, but was defeated by words alone…_

_The crystal stones of the Fourth Dimension were first located in 302 AZ, and through the translator Lord Philipe were able to give linguists knowledge of the language of the Atmos of the First Dimension…_

Reeeally complex, considering that this was just a computer game. She looked at the romance novel.

"_Karilyn flicked her golden waves of hair from her face as she stared up into Brennan's limpid pools…The bold pirate raised his sword to her bodice and ripped it through…Their kiss of reunion had all the flavours of true love, flutteringly beguilingly pure love at long last…and they lived happily after…_"

Boring. But flicking through it had shown something like a complete story. pretty much all of the books in this library (that she'd bothered to look at) did.

It didn't matter. She'd ask Rick about it later. Maybe he _skyloaded_ some extra things on it, to add a little extra _realism_.

Nothing that she could do with them, anyway. Books weren't her thing. Too slow.

She hurried down from the library, and thrust the things into Lady Illusion's hands. Good. She'd cleaned up the room a bit.

"They're damn boring," she said. "You'd probably like them. If you're not busy mending my clothes."

Lady Illusion raised an eyebrow. "Appreciated," she said coolly.

* * *

It was only an hour or so later that she found the Zombies picking on Chuck.

Or more like "picking on him" as in "picking _at_ him". Which was a little unusual, because up until now, asides from their bugging Random a little bit, the zombies had been the most well behaved of all the creatures that were currently taking refuge in the Haunted House. In fact they were normally pretty random things in general, not much good for anything except hanging around in graveyards and singing bad songs.

Except that they seemed to have gone a little bit... nuts.

And Chuck had the wrist cannon, but he didn't seem to be using it properly. Sure he wqas firing it, but there was no lightning coming _out_ of it, and the Zombie that was nearest looked like some kind of mangy dog (like that thing Lady Illusion turned into once, now _that_ was weird) snatching at him and going for his throat.

And Chuck really was _useless_ at pretty much everything that didn't involve a computer, so...

Sparx hesitated for a second.

After all, she'd promised Fear (sort of, in not so many words, so maybe it wasn't really a promise at all, maybe it was more of a vague sort of agreement, and she wasn't so worried about breaking those) that she wouldn't damage any of the Minions. They _needed_ them, he said (though Sparx wasn't exactly sure how or _why_ because most of them were just stupid zombies and cockroaches and Harpix that didn't have feathers anymore), so she had promised not to really destroy any of them, not even when she was sparring.

Except that it wasn't about her just needing something to fight with this time. It wasn't about zombies running around and lashing at her just because she wanted them to. This was about them going after Chuck, for no good reason, and Sparx...

...She wasn't _okay_ with that. So she jumped at them, sword raised and lightning crackling.

'Back off, deadbeats!'

And they did back off – really, _really_ quickly. Still, Sparx managed to slash through a couple of them with her sword first just to make a point that she wasn't meant _business_. They're really easy to destroy – easier than they should be, in fact, and they go down with little more than a sweep and a stab.

Not much of a challenge for her, but it got the job done. Things _vanished_ too easily in this place these days.

'You okay, Chuck?'

Chuck sounded kind of like he was... what was the word? That long, weird one that Mark used? _Hyperventilating_; that was it. But at least he _was _breathing and seemed to be pretty much okay. Luckily, zombies didn't really have special powers or attacks to speak of.

'Y-yeah, but... Man...' he paused still trying to breathe right. 'Not... that I deny them sanctuary, or anything but... I really, really don't like those Zombies.'

'Yeah, you and me both, Chuckdude,' she thumped him on the back, because she'd heard that was what you were supposed to do when people started not breathing right, except that it didn't seem to help.

'So what the Oblivion did _they_ want?'

'Don't... ask me, dude, one minute I'm running some inspects on the shield thing and the next,' he clicked his fingers. 'Just like that! Zombies coming outta the ground everywhere. Not cool, Sparx. Seriously. Not. Cool.'

He looked weird, Sparx realised. Like someone who had been scared for too long. And it kind of made her wonder how _she_ must look. Never mind the ugly dress and the shoes that didn't fit right.

'You crazy? Why didn't you just hightail it to Random, or something? Seriously, Chuck, like you were doing any good with that thing.' She pointed at the wrist cannon and Chuck glanced at it like someone who hadn't even realised it was there.

'Oh, yeah I have no idea what happened with that. I don't get it. I mean I've used this thing before. Only a little, sure, but... damn thing just wouldn't fire right.'

'Here, gimme that,' Sparx said, impatiently, reaching out and pulling the cannon from his wrist. It wasn't a great fit on her own arm –she hated projectiles anyway, preferring the firepower and grip of her sword– but she could still aim it well enough. Except that when she fired, she didn't get the fire show she had expected.

A few shivers of lightning. Then a bigger one. Then it coughed and spluttered and just... stopped. Sparking, the way it had that time when Random mentally smashed it into pieces.

'Huh. That's weird.' She frowned, pulling it off her wrist and tossing it back. Chuck jumbled with it a bit before succeeding in catching it. He really _was_ kinda useless, Sparx thought. Or maybe useless wasn't the right word. Maybe a better choice of words would be "out of his depth by about a thousand Kryllimetres."

'Mark used it earlier,' Chuck shrugged. 'Seemed okay then.'

'Better get Random to fix it, if he can, then,' Sparx shrugged. Not that Random would really be able to. This wasn't the junkyard, and he didn't have any tools or anything. Maybe she could find some in the attic, or something. Maybe Chuck could even fix it with that Laptop of his, if it was still working okay too. She hadn't seen him with it so often lately. Not since the last time they visited the attic, in fact.

And then Sparx looked at his arm again. 'Chuckdude, what happened to your hand?'

'What? What is it? What about my hand?' Chuck... freaked a little bit, the way he always did. Then looked at his left hand- the one which wore the wrist cannon and stopped flinching, choosing instead to just stare at the blue substance that had just appeared there. 'Oh... damn.'

The blood was blue, Sparx realised. Like theirs – drifting lighter than air across his palm.

Chuck shuddered. 'Well, that's certainly creepy as hell,' he muttered, seeming more... annoyed than anything else.

'Uh... So, should it be that way?'

'Yeah, I figure it should,' Chuck muttered clenching and unclenching his fist a bit until the bleeding trailed off. 'It's not usually, but then, we're not here usually. It's kind of odd actually seeing it, that's all.'

Sparx didn't know why that thought –that _sight_– freaked her out, but it kind of did.

'You're not...' she paused, struck by something... odd. 'You're not scared, are you?'

'What right now?'

'Sorta... but all the time, too. You're not scared.' That was really strange, Spax thought. She had never thought of him not being scared, but she couldn't think of any other way to explain why he wasn't doing his usual freak out right now. And when she thought about it a little more, she realised he hadn't looked that scared of the Zombies either.

'...I dunno,' Chuck seemed confused by that. 'I mean I'm pretty sure I am, but...'

Sparx said nothing after he went quiet... she just waited. 'Maybe... I guess when you're scared all the time, you kinda stop noticing. It just turns into another part of you, right? Just something else. If you don't look at it that way then youll probably lose it and start doing stupid things that just make everything _worse_. Chuck shrugged for a second. That wasn't a _real_ smile, but Sparx returned it anyway, on impulse. 'I think it's normal. You look over your shoulder and you check your step before you walk, for the same reasons that you breathe and eat and stuff... are you hungry?'

She wasn't. Lightning Knights... _Sparx_ didn't need to eat. Or at least not as much as humans did. 'Why?' she blurted it out before she could shut her mouth and keep it in.

'Why am I hungry? It's kinda human thing.'

'Not _that_, Chuckdude I mean why does it have to be like that, anyway? Why do you have to be so scared all the time that I can't _tell_ if you're scared?' Okay, that question made a lot less sense when she said it out loud than it had when she asked it in her head. Still, Chuck seemed to get it.

'It doesn't have to, I guess,' Chuck said. 'But it works as well as anything else. I mean, they know I'm scared, even if I don't show it, so...'

'So that's why Mark walks around looking like the minions are about to tackle him?'

'Uh, no, he does that because they usually _are_ about to tackle him.'

'You know what I _mean!_' She was... frustrated, annoyed, maybe even a little upset, and she didn't like him not making sense. He always made sense usually, if in a weird, Chuck-dude type way. 'I don't get it. We're _alive_, right? And I've said like a million times, I'm not gonna let them hurt _either_ of you. And Fear's being okay about all this even though you're meant to be enemies and he'd rather not have _anyone_ here, and he's not even that _bad_ to you anymore.'

'Uh, dude, sword?'

'Oh, sorry,' Sparx flicked her fingers up, making the sword vanish so that she didn't randomly slash in around while pacing back and forth and risk putting a hole in him. 'But... I'm serious. You just got set on by zombies and you didn't freak. And Mark's been walking around looking like the _Ghost of Pigface Past_ is after him, and Random? When was the _last_ time he went psycho evil on us? Not that that's a bad thing, but it's still out of it.. .and I know things aren't normal here.'

Sparx swallowed a bit on that last sentence, without quite knowing why, and Chuck didn't say or do anything, just stood there opening and closing his hand.

'You know you're not really making sense here, right, Sparx?'

'Fuck sense! I _know_ that, but people act like I'm _stupid_ about this whole damn thing, and like I don't _know_ anything. I know that Ace is out there in that real world and can't get us back...' Or isn't trying to hard enough. 'And I know things are falling apart, and we're probably gonna go with it if something doesn't happen, but we can't _make_ things happen, Chuck. _Do Right and Fear Not_ doesn't work anymore!

'So what the oblivion am I supposed to do, Chuck? Why the heck can't...' Things just be _normal_? Or as close to normal as we can make them in a place like this. Why can't you be okay with this and with me and why can't we get out of here and where is home in the first place?

Chuck just looked at her for one long moment. 'I know that.'

'I didn't even finish the question!'

'No, not that, dude, I mean I know _Do Right and Fear Not_ doesn't work. You can't Fear Not, right? It... You just _can't_. We can't. And this isn't really about doing Right either so the Code doesn't apply.' He shook his head. 'I guess I'm just tired of all that, dude. I think we all are. Tired of faking out way through everything like it's just like it used to be. And we want to go home.'

Sparx felt something twisting inside of her in a totally different way to the twist she got when she was arguing (or making up) with Fear, or "talking" to Lady Illusion or fighting with a zombie.

This idea would be just great if "home" had a better definition. But maybe it didn't anymore. A part of her wants to say "me too", but what was the point in that?

Home was a memory of something that didn't exist and of people that never were and things that never happened. Home was a Tower she stormed out of and a carnival she was supposed to be at war in and a guy who'd been dead for three hundred years and couldn't be anything but an evil overlord, because it was all he was ever meant to be and didn't really want to be anything else, not even for her...

Home was a place she didn't want to be, beneath a shield she didn't want to have to keep her alive, with zombies who tried to kill people and mortals who were losing it.

The boys had a real home, though. Maybe that was because they were normal, really. They'd had lives before all this started. They had parents, who were probably kind of worried by now. And Ace was just an addition to that life that made things a bit more complicated.

Sparx decided to stop thinking these things. They were stupid things, and they didn't _get_ her anywhere anyway. So she looked at Chuck instead, and said: 'Look we'll get out of here, okay? I mean we always do. And it's not like we've been forgotten or anything, and it's not like there's...' No way out, no way in, no answers in plain sight, no one to help us, nothing left. '...We'll get out, Chuckdude.'

'Thanks, man,' Chuck... actually sounded dike he believed her there. He shrugged turning the wrist cannon over in his hands. 'Sure we will. Soon as we work out how. Better take this back anyway, fat lot of good it did...'

'Where _is_ the kid anyway?' Sparx asked, mostly as a way to distract herself from the conversation they just had. 'Hiding from Cockroaches again?'

'Nah, he's with Random.'

Sparx had a feeling that should've surprised her more than it did. 'Man, he does have a death wish, huh?'

'You talking about Mark, or Random?' Chuck half smiled and Sparx didn't know what to say to that, so she just let him go, and watched him walk back across the courtyard towards the rear of the Haunted House.

Mortals were weird.

* * *

'I'm going to talk,' Sparx said to her. 'And you're going to listen to me, Lady.'

Lady Illusion looked up from her book. Sparx noticed that it was the same dull History thing that she had picked up in the library earlier –figured that Lady Illusion would like the boring stuff, but anyway, that wasn't important right now.

Lady Illusion's eyebrow rose in... Sparx figured that it was supposed to be her "this could get interesting even if you're not worth my time" expression. Whatever. Sparx could ignore that.

'By all means,' Lady Illusion said. 'Pull up a chair. I repaired the one that was broken before.'

Sparx could've responded to that, too. She could've said "don't give me orders" or "don't think you can charm your way around me like you do everyone else, because like fuck is it going to work,' but she didn't. She didn't pull up as chair either, just folded her arms, walked into the room and leant her back against the wall.

For a moment there was quiet. It was similar to the kind of quiet she sometimes heard between the boys when they were arguing and couldn't think of anything else to say, or the silences she got from Ace when he was brooding about (Lady Illusion) something stupid. The silence of waiting and impatience.

'I hate you,' Sparx said.

You words stung, but they felt right too. They felt like something that _should_ be there – something that always had been. She meant them all. 'Because of what you did to Ace.' Those words... however. Sparx wasn't entirely sure about those words. _Those_ words didn't feel right at all, but they were still true, she realised, and Lady Illusion made no obvious reaction to them, so Sparx continued. 'And I hate what you made him into with those stupid human emotions, and I hate you for stuff you did, for betraying Fear. And I hate you for trying to _hurt_ me, even if you never really did it.'

Lady Illusion _could_ have chosen to open her mouth at this point too, Sparx conceded. To make a comment about the number of times that she _had_ beaten Sparx in a fight, but once again, her mouth stayed tightly closed around that possible jibe.

'But that's not the bit I hate the most,' Sparx said.

The Lady closed her book, folding over the corner of a page to mark her place, and laid it on the pink bedcover. She then folded her arms back over her knees and waited.

'I hate you, but not so much because you're evil. You're _not_ completely evil, you're just a bitch. And I'm not just talking about when you're in that stupid dog morph.'

'There's a saying amongst mortals, Sparx,' Lady Illusion said. 'It says something about a pot and a kettle, calling each other black.'

'Yeah. That's sort of the problem too,' Sparx said, coldly. 'Because I'm not all good. And you're probably not all evil. And that's annoying, see, because I grew up...' she snorted out a laugh at the words "grew up". '...Believing that there was good and bad and that's it. But there's not. You think you're better than me. Sometimes you even beat me, and that's not right, because evil doesn't _win_ against good guys.'

'Clearly there was something wrong with that formula, according to the mortal world,' Lady Illusion said. But she said it with less sarcasm than Sparx had expected her too. Like she actually _believed _it.

'Doesn't matter why it's true,' Sparx said. 'Point is that it _is_.'

'And you believe that I somehow prove this little fact about your existence, and that this is a reason for you to force your anger upon me?' Lady Illusion said, sounding as if she thought that was the most ridiculous thing in the world.

'Yeah, that. And also because you're a bitch. But I'm going to talk to you anyway, _Lady_, because I know something about you. I know you love Ace.'

'Another thing for you to hate?' Lady Illusion asked.

'Hey, you're the one who acted like I was some kind of dumbo rival, Lady,' Sparx snapped. Then forced herself back to the topic in hand. 'That's what I'm going to talk to you about. You love Ace,' she gritted her teeth. 'And Ace loves Mark.'

Sparx stood upright, walked across the room and sat down on the bed. Less than three feet away from her, Sparx thought, and wasn't sure whether or not to feel repulsed by that thought. They'd made contact before, in battle. When they _fought_ and showed how much they hated each other.

'Aren't we getting rather psychological here? I never thought that was your particular tack, Sparx.'

'Shut up.' Sparx said, quickly. 'One more word and I'll hurt you.'

Lady Illusion responded to that comment with a small smile. Then she nodded, as if in a suggestion that Sparx should continue. Sparx's temper flared but she kept talking anyway.

'He loves Chuck too, you know. And he loves me –I don't care what you have to say about that, I know he _does_. I didn't figure it at first because I didn't figure loving was ever the important part. The important part was we were sidekicks, right? So we helped him out. That was the right thing to do. But it doesn't just apply to us. Ace loves Random, too. Hell he's even kinda fond of that Kitty girl and we've only met her like, _twice_. In fact I think Ace loves a lot of people who you're not supposed to like. It's a crazy emotion and it's human, but it's important to him.'

'Is this spurt of melodramatics supposed to be leading somewhere?'

There was a flicker of pink, and Sparx pressed the sword close to Lady Illusion's throat. The bedpost burned and smoked, the book fell to the floor. 'Be. Quiet.'

Lady Illusion closed her mouth and stopped smiling. Good for her. Sparx pulled back a little, just enough so that she wasn't half on top of the lady, crushing her against the bedpost, but she kept her sword where it was. 'Thing is, I realised something else recently. It's not exactly a big secret that Ace pretty much gives a damn about everyone. He loves people. Maybe because of those stupid human emotions or maybe he could already do that to begin with anyway, I don't know and I don't care. But I know you'll do anything if it'll make him keep loving you. I know that's why you haven't killed the boys yet. I know that's why you stay away from me.

'And this place?' Sparx kept going, deciding not to pause, for fear of letting the Lady get a word in edgeways and throwing her entire point off. 'This entire world? It's all about laws and bindings and rules. And vows have _power_, especially in places like the Haunted House and the Carnival. Like how the zombies made a vow to Fear that they'd be loyal to him, and that's why they don't run away when I kill them. And it's probably why you stuck around him so long when Ace was who you really wanted to be with.

'...Of course, those rules and laws are pretty much breaking down now along with the game, aren't they? _Aren't_ they?'

'I suppose that would be one way of putting it,' Lady Illusion spoke with a slight waver in her voice. Good.

'Exactly. But the rules still kind of apply anyway. See I realised something –I realised why it was that you broke your word to Fear: it was because eventually you decided you loved Ace more, and maybe that's the only thing which can break a Vow made in the carnival between evils. Yeah. I admit that,' Sparx pulled her sword back a little, giving the Lady a long and almost... thoughtful stare. 'I can admit that.'

Lady Illusion seemed vaguely surprised. 'Could this be a confession ?'

'No, it's not. I still don't trust you. But I will, eventually. Because I'm going to make it so that you can't hurt anyone else I care about, no matter what, Lady. And to prove to you just how much I _trust_ you, we're going to make a vow.'

Lady Illusion... blinked. 'I beg your pardon?'

'A vow. You know, one signed with blood and all that? Like the one you evils give to fear – the one you broke. But I don't think you'll be able to break this one.'

'...You can't do that,' Lady Illusion said, but she didn't sound all that sure of herself.

'Why not? I'm the Lady of the House now, right? And you're my servant, so you're bound to whatever I tell you you're bound to. I know the rules, _Illusion_.'

Sparx stood up, pulling away while still holding her sword, before turning to look back at the Lady, still sitting on the bad, observing Sparx calmly. 'And what if I refuse to take this vow?'

'You won't.' Sparx said, surely. 'I give the orders around here.'

'In the old days you would have backed up your threats.'

'The old days aren't now,' Sparx spat, feeling more certain of that fact than she ever had been before. Lady Illusion appeared not to react, but Sparx was getting to know her now, and the lady was insane, after all. There was no way she could hide _everything_.

'...Then by all means, Mistress. State your orders.'

Being called that would probably have made Sparx feel better if it _hadn't_ been said with that much sarcasm. 'Here. Gimme your hand.'

Lady Illusion did. The pale green palm, paler than the rest of her skin, was slender and the fingers were a touch too long and bonelike as they lay within Sparx's own. 'I don't have a knife,' Sparx said, gesturing with the sharp end of her sword. 'You mind? Not that it matters.'

Lady Illusion said nothing. Her eyes remained fixed on Sparx, in a combination of intrigued and anxious.

Normally, Sparx considered, as she drew up the sword in her free hand and allowed a few pink glimmers to trail across its surface, sharpening the blade, she would have been aiming somewhere more delicate. The heart (sometimes) or the face (usually). Somewhere that would stop her in her tracks, kill her on the spot. Seemed almost a shame that this wasn't an option that time, but Sparx didn't want to kill anyone. Not even Lady Illusion.

She pushed the end of the blade that was closest the hilt against the Lady's palm, balancing the rest of the sword on the bed. Lady Illusion didn't wince as green liquid welled in the new, open cut and rose in a slender curve around the blade. The blade glistened a strange purple instead of its usual pink.

Sparx cast her a look and smiled. 'Well whaddya know. It words. So here's my terms and conditions, lady. Ready to hear them.'

'Just say it.' Lady Illusion said, calmly.

'Alright then,' Sparx pushed the blade a little deeper. 'Rule number one... you've gotta look after the boys. Keep an eye on them. No shooting at them or tricking them with different kinds of morphs. No letting that dumb Googler touch them, or Kilobyte.'

Lady Illusion stared quietly at the blade and the welling green of her palm for a moment, a trickle of green fell from the blade and burned a small hole into the floor. The room felt... dark, Sparx thought. Dark and colder than it really should have been with Chuck monitoring the locations weather controls. 'Continue.'

The blade cut deeper. 'Rule number two: you have to stay away from Lord Fear. Always. You're not to go near or make contact with him. You're not to attack him.'

'...This is supposed to be an _order_? Were I not locked here it wouldn't be an especially difficult one for me to follow.'

'Things change,' Sparx said, lightly, pushing the blade a touch more. 'And rule number three: You want to be with Ace, lady? Then fine, I'm binding you to him. Like, forever. Even if you want to leave him, you can't. Even if you want to hurt him – you can't. You'll do whatever you have to do to stick with what he thinks is right. I don't care if you like it or not. You can't do anything that would ever hurt him. And I'm binding you to _me_, too. So even if I'm not in the Haunted House, you do what I say.'

'I was under the impression that you were Binding me to a Vow, Sparxie,' Lady Illusion hissed, dryly. 'Not simply testing my resolve.'

'Maybe it's both. Now do you agree, or do I have to burn you?'

'I agree.' She said it without pause or hesitation, without so much as a glimpse to either side. She even looked Sparx right in the eyes as she spoke. 'In the name of My Lady and the House of Illusion. Whatever remains of it. I am bound.'

'Swear it, Lady.'

'I swear.'

The colour around the Sword of Jacob swelled from purple to black, and Sparx wasn't even going to try and work out why that was. The blood that had fell to the floor was turning black too, she noticed, but as soon as Sparx pulled the blade away, lady Illusion morphed away the slash between her palm and fingers, and the room grew warm again. 'Are we finished?'

'What?' Sparx frowned, brought back to reality (whatever reality it was) by the sound of The Lady's voice. 'Oh... yeah. We're finished. You're going to remember that.'

'I have no doubt you won't allow me to forget it,' Lady Illusion said, coolly, before picking up her book and resuming her reading from the folded page.

* * *

_**Nexus points diminish. The rage does not abate outside; having driven the unwanted other to equal fear as it continues to scream for the centre. They are all out of reach now.**_

_**Do right and fear nothing.

* * *

**_


	9. Forms

* * *

**This chapter contains input by Sarah Frost and is roughly 50 hers, 50 mine. Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated.**

* * *

Chapter Nine: Forms. 

_**Location**_: Earth, Conestoga Hills

_**Date**_: 13/08/07

_Nothing else was happening. _Had_ happened. Fighting Kilobyte, Fred, not the other minions, one little thing in favour of Fear's presence threatening everyone else in the Sixth Dimension--fighting to a draw, staggering back to the Thunder Tower and collapsing in exhaustion. No defences against any of this, no friends--he passed over Mark's and Chuckdude's houses, and saw their families' images, the haunted, dark look in their eyes. _

_Without friends... _

_He had emotions now. And they hated. _

_Every defeat from Kilobyte. Every day without his friends. Every day without _her_. _

_The unwanted other driven to fear...as they all. As he/it still searched for him._

_He was here now._

_There was a voice._

_And there was a world, and a storm that consumed itself. Dream, nightmare. He was all of it. Named for him once--no, he had no name. In him was everything._

_It all crashed after him in bright waves, bright typhoons. No way to hide from it; not wave after wave, but all waves at once--unceasing. Time without time without space without depth._

_The voice was his, and he was screaming._

* * *

**Location**: The Haunted House

**Date**: 14/08/07

Sparx woke up to the sound of minions screaming. Again. And absolutely no sign of Fear when she looked around. He was probably outside already, trying to deal with whatever it was making all that Zoardamn noise.

Except that the noises were louder this time than the minions usually were (there was only so loud anything could be when it's vocal cords were rotting, she supposed). It sounded more like there was a fight-fight going on, than just another random skirmish-fight. By the time she got down into the courtyard (stupid dresses, she never thought she'd miss her uniform so much) pretty much everyone was there. She could see the boys peeking out from the courtyard where they were keeping Random, Random himself stood behind them like some kind of iron giant (whoa, too many human movies) and to her left side, the Lady.

Sparx didn't say anything about that.

The screaming she could hear came from the zombies alright, Sparx realized after a moment, and when she looked up, she saw them, cast in huge green spider-webs (like hers, disturbingly like hers, maybe Fear had taught her how to do that in the first place? Maybe there _was_ no Lady Illusion before she came to him…) presumably coming from Lord Fear. She watched as their limbs broke away and disintegrated as they were sucked deep into the wall of energy surrounding the Haunted House.

Oh. So that was where he'd been getting all the power to keep those walls up.

'As you can see,' Lady Illusion said, plainly, sounding almost like her old self. 'We just ran out of Zombies. I wonder what he's going to destroy next.'

'What're you talking about? They're not alive.' Sparx muttered.

'No? But we are, and he just used up the last of the NPCs.'

Sparx blinked. 'The what now?'

'A computer term, apparently,' Lady Illusion shrugged nonchalantly. 'I heard it from your friend back there.'

Sparx glimpsed over her shoulder. Mark was whispering something to Chuck. She couldn't tell what from here, and the two of them disappeared back into the house before she could yell to them and ask. What were they creeping around like that for anyway? Sparx scowled.

'Things are becoming rather desperate.' Lady Illusion commented. 'You don't think that maybe it's time we suggested he find another way out of this mess? As thrilling as it must be to have the entire Sixth Dimension under the throes of his power again, t won't be much good to anyone before long.'

'You don't tell me what to do.'

'Then consider it advice. In respect of our agreement,' she said evenly. 'Don't forget, I am incapable of doing anything which might bring harm to the mortals.'

Oh, yeah. Their agreement. Sparx remembered that now. Which means I could order her back to her room and tell her to shut up, if I made up a good enough excuse about it being for the kids sake, she thought. Then didn't do it. 'What're you _out_ here for, anyway? I never said to leave your room.'

'You expect anyone to sleep with that racket?' Lady Illusion asked.

The zombies were almost gone now. They were certainly screaming a lot less, and as Sparx watched the last of them seemed to fall strangely quiet. If she listened, she could almost image she heard a few warbled mutterings of music. The last the zombies singing about 'Clementine's and oranges' or something like that. And then they were gone, the deep green of the sky faded slightly and began to fade back to its previous gold.

Sparx shivered. Lady Illusion pushed a strand of hair away from her own face, watching the now empty sky with continued interest.

All of a sudden, Sparx wanted Ace. She had no idea why exactly, she just wanted him _here_ so he could say something about Zombies getting what they deserved, or come up with some way in which they could deal with all of this. She'd never felt trapped here before. Not since this whole thing started, anyway. In the old days when the carnival had still meant her being caught and sliced inside some creepy giant crystal ball? Sure. But that was then and this is now and…

…Being in the Haunted House shouldn't scare her anymore. It _didn't_ scare her it just…

No. It didn't bother her at all, she told herself. Not really. She's destroyed Zombies before.

'Well that was creepy,' she said. 'I didn't figure that was how he did it.'

'You weren't aware of it? This has been happening for a while,' Lady Illusion said, pushing the boundaries of their agreement. 'Where else do you imagine all his power comes from while we've been trapped here?'

'He does what he has to do. You should be grateful, lady, if it weren't for him…' Then we'd probably all be as wiped out as those zombies.

Still. No more zombies. A part of her was kind of disappointed about that. They had always been there. Just like those birds that used to hang around the Thunder Tower back on earth. Their sudden absence now was…weird.

'It won't last,' Lady Illusion said. 'There is little left to draw from now. The wall itself will turn against him. It's part of the power as well, after all. Odds are it will become our downfall.'

Sparx snorted. 'No one asked you.'

'No one needed to. It's obvious enough for all to see what's going on. The god of his own, insular domain can't prevent the demon child,' she said. Sparx didn't ask what she meant by that. Lady Illusion was insane, after all.

* * *

_He wasn't himself. _

_He knew that. He was something else. Yet it was him; he couldn't deny his own responsibilities--the scream inside, the violence of the unravelling, above all the bitterness--so much hatred. Feelings he knew from himself. _

_And he saw. The worlds of the Sixth Dimension, everything he once hated about the evils who had tried to kill his friends. Canary Mines, crushed and ruined and shattered, black splinters flying like needles into the air--what Kilobyte had done to the House of Illusion, barren grounds almost healed by the green mould that swept across them, pieces breaking and falling into an almost-beautiful swirling vortex. _

_the world of the sixth dimension. Destroyed. Crumbling, because he willed it to be so. And..._

_He wasn't certain where he was precisely. If it's the human world, or the sixth dimension itself, or somewhere locked between them, in the middle of everything that ever was and ever would be. It hardly mattered in the end. All that mattered was his actions. All that mattered was the destruction of the world that had created him. _

_And his friends... his friends were there somewhere, their bodies tangled in the remaining mess of the worlds. He would find them, maybe, dig them out if he could. Pull them away and leave them elsewhere. But they were gone now, just as he too would be when this was all over. As would Kilobyte be. As would Lord Fear. As would the remaining fragments of the master programmer, sprawled out across the DataStream. _

_From artifice hero to destroyer, he thinks, and would laugh at the amusement of it all, were he that sure he still had a mouth with which to do so. _

_This was what he wanted. _

* * *

**Location**: The Haunted House, Study.

**Date**: 14/08/07

Ridiculous, honestly.

As if he hadn't already noticed precisely what those darned mortals were up to. Stealing the amulet pieces from right under his nose, indeed. as if they assumed he no longer thought them of any importance.

Well. Perhaps they weren't. But their disappearance said something about what the mortal children were planning.

Still, they were nothing which could not be dealt with efficiently, if necessary, Lord Fear thought, as he cradled the final piece in one boned palm and gazed from the tower window, observing the consequences of his earlier work. Zombie death did not a particularly attractive scene make, but it was certain better than having the shield disintegrate. It had been foolish of him to allow it to weaken so greatly without strengthening it, honestly, but there had been... distractions.

In actual fact, this was his domain now. That was something which Lord Fear had been dwelling upon quite recently, when not being distracted by his angel's seemingly endless desire for attention (not that he was unhappy to oblige, per se, but his organ playing was suffering). This was the entirety of all the Sixth Dimension's remaining stable land. All that remained of it now fell under his rule and control, its citizens dependent on his powers for their survival, subject to all his whims and choices. And with no interference from Lightning.

It was simply a shame that there was not much of it left to speak of.

It was indeed ironic.

'If one might say as much, m'lord.' Staffhead said, grinning from where he had perched himself regally on the ledge. 'That was one very lovely piece of spellbinding work you did on those Zombies this morning. Why, to capture so many of them in but a single shot. Genius it was. That's what I've been saying all along, I have. We've been so very limited by that silly mortal world and all its rules.

'Quite, my Staff,' Fear replied. He was content to leave their conversation at that, but Staffhead had been most irritatingly chatty of late. In fact, the Zombies had been a remarkably simply target. That was why he had allowed so many of them sanctuary: feeble, flimsy creatures to be used as power sources for the shield once the time came, as it had that morning. There as perhaps a zombie or two bustling about the grounds, but they would be nothing much to speak of.

'Happens that if this one weren't fallin' to bits around our heads,' Staffhead went on, cheerily. 'Then this "game" of theirs might not've been such a bad place to command.'

'Would it indeed?' Lord Fear felt amusement prickling with irritating. True enough. This had been the world he so desired command over, at one time. And now he had it, not that this was proving to be as glorious as he had imagined.

'Well, it's what you wanted in the first place after all, is that not so? The minions act real enough, and what with the old rule of "I think therefore I am," bein' what it is... Shame, honestly. About the fallin' to pieces thing.'

'Indeed. Quite a shame,' Lord Fear said, and found to his surprise that he almost meant it.

Staffhead shuffled, clearly unprepared for the silence. 'Then uh... I would be wondering, my Lord Fear. How, exactly are we planning on getting out of here? Strengthening that shield up and up is all very well but sooner or later, we're going to run out of stuff to drain and throw into it. Y'can't make magic outta thin air, after all.' Staffhead blinked and suddenly looked hopeful. 'Ere! Can we throw that kid into it?'

'I hardly think such an act would benefit us,' Fear muttered calmly. 'He is a mortal. Their connection to this world is a vague one at best, and they exist amongst us as mere ghosts of another reality. The amulet however...' he ran his bony fingers against the hidden compartment of the organ (he honestly should've thought to change the musical pattern for that thing before deciding to use it as a storage compartment all over again.) 'Much power still remains within it.'

'And that's what we're needing here, right, Milord?' Staffhead asked. 'And that toe rag of a mortal, pinching them from right under your nose when we wasn't looking. It's a disgrace is what it is. Not to mention incredibly ungrateful of them. You should track 'em down and make those brats show their pittance, Milord..'

'There is no need to be hunting anyone down at the moment.'

'Why not? 'Ere, are you gonna get him up here and wring them out of him again or what?' Staffhead shook his head, seeming bewildered. 'I honestly don't know what you're planning here, Lord Fear. Something within your typical genius, surely, but still...'

'Be patient, my loyal staff,' Fear said, uttering that phrase spoken again and again so frequently. 'We still hold this one fragment, after all. The child will come to us.'

'And what –pardon me m'lord– makes you so sure of that?'

'Call it an Evil Overlord's Hunch,' Lord Fear said plainly, curling the final amulet piece tight within one hand.

Ah yes. Irony. Nothing could be more familiar to an ancient living corpse than that.

* * *

**Location**: The Haunted House, Lady Illusion's Chamber.

**Date**: 14/08/07

When Sparx returned to the room to fetch her clothing, she found a neat, small pile resting on the chair, and Lady Illusion just...sitting there calmly, with her hands folded on her lap, an almost anticipatory gleam in her eyes.

"It's finished," she said.

"Thanks," Sparx said flatly, putting a hand down on soft green material. "You mean that's all..." Not exactly a wardrobe full, not that she'd wanted dopey hand-me-downs anyway.

"That's all," Lady Illusion said calmly. "I _do_ morph, you know." She stood up, quickly and gracefully. She'd morphed her clothes into something like her old battlesuit, like she was ready to fight once again.

"All right," Sparx said. "So…what're you going to do now, laundry?"

"I'm going to find Ace," she said, and the way she was saying it reminded Sparx of some old mortal movie about crazies, the sort of crazies who saw things that weren't there and did stuff mortals shouldn't have been able to do, like used a really tiny razorblade to cut people into a thousand little pieces before Ace made her turn off the television on grounds of excessive depiction of violence.

"Got a bright idea for getting here to the mortal world? Share," Sparx said.

She shook her head. "No. He's here," she said in that same calm tone of voice, and her eyes were almost _glittering_ like she wasn't flesh and blood any more, made instead of something that shimmered inside her. "I owe you that much, so I'm bothering to tell you."

Sparx really didn't like it.

"You should believe me," she said. "I can…feel it. Illogical or not. Goodbye, Sparx."

And then she reached across, and took Sparx' hand, and that was such a weird thing for Lady Illusion to do that Sparx didn't object at first.

"What—"

And there was light, the bright shiny rainbow bits around her hand that always turned up when Lady Illusion was using her powers, and Sparx could feel it, little parts burrowing straight into her skin where she wasn't wearing gloves any more (though _Zoar_, she wished she was), and though she was trying to pull away she couldn't. Green mottled bits were appearing on her, going up her arm like leaves growing on her, like Lady Illusion was reaching inside her, running her through with her own sword like Googler, not a sword, her hand, her body like a claw, and it was—

Like Lady Illusion was morphing _into_ her, arms joined and then their bodies meeting and changing, more intimate and strangely distant than anything she'd managed to do with Fear, alien and wrong, and she couldn't think any more as her brain started seeing colours as well, and they weren't two people anymore and she could feel it all, both of them Sparx and so they could get out of there, and she felt herself stepping out the door, her doubly heavy fist striking down the guard.

_I could stop your heart from here_, she heard the whisper with her lips forming the words, the Lady her, inside her, seeing things from just the wrong height, perspective jumbled as a kaleidoscope puzzle, powers dancing in their minds and the shape too-much-there for their size.

Mortals said, she vaguely remembered in the brain-not-her-brain, that inside every fat man there was a thin man struggling to get out, and though she wasn't fat, a part of her wanted to say in annoyance, she could feel the other body inside her, waiting for the chance to rip her open and step out of the falling-apart blue-bleeding halves—

_But I'll just let Lord Fear work through this instead_, she said, and Sparx felt her moving inside her, the cells and blood and face not her own, marbled-green on her chest and arms again as she stepped out from her. Numbed, her abandoned body letting itself go; and falling, knitting back into herself as the Lady left her, alone, falling into darkness as she made her escape.

* * *


	10. All For One and One For All

**This chapter contains input by Sarah Frost. Standard disclaimers apply. Reviews and concrit are appreciated.**

* * *

Ten: All For One and One For All.

**Location**: The Haunted House Cellar

**Date**: 14/08/07

'Aaaand that would be the last of the junkyard disintegrating right about there,' Chuck pointed at a smudge on the screen of his laptop, filled with black marks and lies of energy before it disappeared entirely. The map of the sixth dimension before them looked like an old honeycomb disintegrating piece by piece.

Mark nodded uneasily. 'There's… not much left is there?' He mumbled, and then he pointed to the centre of the map. 'And that?'

'That? Is the heart of all this,' Chuck said, with no doubt a lot more calmness than he actually felt. 'If you wanna call it that. Everything here is closing in on that one point, like water down a drain or something.'

'Or a black hole?'

'Yeah exactly,' Chuck sounded vaguely amused that Mark had chosen that exact wording. in fact, he'd sounded pretty amused by most of the things mark had said so far. Mark wasn't all that sure whether Chuck was just humoring him with all this, but he decided that it didn't really matter anyway.

**_Role reversal_, **said the voice in Mark's mind, with no less amusement, and it was accompanied by a wave of confusion

'…Chuck?'

'Yeah, dude?'

Mark tried to think of a good way in which to phrase his next question but the only thing that would emerge from his mouth in the end was: 'Why're you doing this?'

It was a reasonable enough question. Just a few days ago (had it been that long already? Damn it…)

'Man, let's not go into that again,' Chuck sighed. 'You're my friend, okay? I trust you. Even when you're suggesting stupid things. Isn't that good enough?'

'Yeah it is, but that's not the reason.'

Chuck grunted to himself. 'It's the only one I can give you, man. Maybe I'm starting to think like whatever's out there can't really be as bad as what's waiting for us in here, too.'

'...You don't have to come.'

'Yeah I do.'

'No,' Mark repeated, forcefully. 'You _don't_. Chuck, you shouldn't have to risk getting killed for something I want to do.'

Chuck... smiled, it seemed. 'Man, that's what I've been doing for the last four years.'

'Oh, very funny.'

'Seriosly, though, the heroic look really doesn't work on you, buddy. And this isn't about either of us; it's about Ace Lightning. I appreciate the gesture, though.'

'He appreciates the gesture,' Mark muttered dryly. 'Oh wonderful. Good to know I'm appreciated enough for people to let me go off following voices in my head. Just... make sure you check that thing another half a dozen times before we even think of getting near that wall. It's dangerous just standing there right now.'

'I know, man, I _know_. When did you start thinking like my mom?'

'Since voices in my head started talking to me,' Mark smiled humorlessly.

'Ha. Well so long as they're not telling you to kill me with my pillowcase.'

'Who says they're not? And you don't have a pillowcase.'

Chuck sighed, turning around. 'Hey, a little help here?'

'Sorry, kid, you're on your own for this one.' Random said, shrugging as best he could with his one shoulder. 'I'd probably blow the thing up just by getting too close to it. We all know what happened the last time you exposed me to that.'

'Yeah, but that was Mark's fault,' Chuck said, picking up the Wrist Cannon from where it lay on the floor and examining it. 'Still I think I can deal with this… We don't need it to do much; just create a power disruption from long enough for us to get from this side of the shield to the other. Which is, you know, kinda suicidal in and of itself, but…'

'But it's the best we can do. It's not like we can just teleport across,' Mark nodded. Maybe seeing those zombies disintegrating en masse in order to power up the shield this morning had flicked the same switch in Chuck's brain as it apparently had in Random's. They had to do something. And if that something involved following weird voices in Mark's head? Well, that was still better than nothing.

'Who says?' A voice called.

Mark knew who it belonged to, even if it appeared to be coming from one of the cockroaches sitting on the floor nearby, curled up in the manner of something dead. A second later, the dead thing was gone and a woman stood in its place, smiling in amusement at Chuck's alarm.

'Oh, man! Dude, I really wish you wouldn't do that.' Chuck gasped. 'It freaks me out.'

'My apologies. it's been a while since I utilised my morphing abilities to their full potential,' Lady Illusion said, and while this didn't make much sense to mark, he didn't comment. 'I suppose I simply couldn't resist.'

'Lady Illusion, Why're you here?' Mark frowned. 'I thought they had you confined to your room under threat of execution if you left.' and they had guards stationed at every entrance and egress, he added mentally.

'True, but certain deals still exist in this world which can override regulation. you don't need to do that,' Lady Illusion nodded at the write cannon. 'I can provide transportation to the other side of the shield myself.'

'What... you'd do that?' Chuck frowned.

'My thoughts exactly,' Random said. 'I was under the impression that you would rather rot in one of Fear's back chambers more than you'd rather go out there again,

'Like I said; there are such things as overriding clauses,' Lady Illusion said, flippantly. Mark knew he should probably ask, but he likely wouldn't get a decent explanation out of her if he did anyway. 'I'm simply fulfilling my side of an agreement... What precisely are you doing here?'

Mark took a moment to reply, and when he eventually did, he wrapped one hand quite firmly around the fragment of amulet around his neck. 'Leaving,' he said.

Lady Illusion didn't seem as surprised as he'd thought she would be. She simply fixed him with a gaze of intrigued curiosity. 'To find Ace,' she said, and he could see a trace of urgency glittering in the depths of her eyes: somewhere deeper than he'd ever bothered to look before.

'...Yeah,' Mark said, not bothering to ask how she had known that. Somehow he had the feeling that this was exactly why she was here. Something had been muttering in her brain for the last few days too, perhaps? 'We can't stay here any longer anyway, and Chuck thinks if we can modify the wrist cannon we can use it to deflect the shield long enough so we can get out without it… you know…'

'Blowin' us all to kingdom come and back again,' Chuck finished.

'Um, yeah. That's basically it,' Mark shrugged. And when Lady Illusion didn't look away or change her expression, he went on to tell her about the voices, and the weird pulling sensation reaching out to him from beyond the walls Lord Fear had created.

He stopped short before he could tell her anything about the dreams.

Lady Illusion stayed silent for a moment before looking at Random. 'And you're going along with this plan, I presume?'

Random appeared to think about his answer for a moment. Actually, he hadn't made much comment either way yet. Mark didn't actually know whether he was planning to follow them, or… 'Seems like the best thing to do.' Random said. 'When you get down to it, they call this game "_Ace_ _Lightning and the Carnival of Doom_" for a reason right?'

'Exactly,' Mark said. 'And that's because it ends with Ace, and it ends with the Carnival.'

'Which is currently nothing more than a swirling stream of data disintegrating in the heart of the world,' Lady Illusion pointed out, primly.

'Yeah, maybe so, but it's still there,' Mark said with a lot more conviction than he actually felt. 'And that means the ending of the game is still there. So far as we know, that's the only way out of here.'

'But my Onetime Lord remains here,' Lady Illusion added. 'Was the aim of the game all along not to destroy him?'

'No one knows that for sure, dude,' Chuck shrugged. 'I mean... yeah probably. Or that _was_ one of the main goals, at least...'

'But _no one_ ever completed _Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom_,' Mark said. 'Defeating Lord Fear is actually the closest anyone's ever gotten and even then the game isn't won. To win the game for real you need these,' he held out his hands. The Amulet pieces were there, lying. Lady Illusion gazed at him in surprise.

'You acquired them, then.'

'One way or another, yeah,' Mark said dryly. 'Stole them from the study when he was out killing all those zombies this morning. All except the first piece from way back when the game started, that is. He still has that. It looks like we'll have to talk to him anyway and that means talking to Sparx.'

'Ain't that always the way?' Chuck seemed to chuckle at the irony. Here they were, it seemed. Back in the same place they had been at the beginning:

Lady Illusion turned to Random, who had been studying her silently ever since she emerged. 'You're going along with this rather haphazard scheme of your own free will then, Virus?'

'The free will of this me, sure. Right now I'm no more likely to kill them than anything else is,' Random said, and Mark didn't like to reflect on just how accurate that probably was. 'At least this way I could be of some use.'

'You're willing to take that risk?'

'Well maybe it's not about what I could do to them,' Random said, bluntly. 'Maybe this is me, making my own decisions based on what I want, for reasons of my own making.'

'You could always change your mind.'

'Maybe so.' Random said, and after a second, Mark realised that their exchange was over. He sighed. Sometimes he just didn't get anyone in this place.

'And Sparx?' Random asked after a second. 'One of us is planning to inform her of this little plan, right?'

Sure she's coming. She is coming, right? Chuck looked at Mark expectantly. Here, then, was the thing which mark had been trying to put off all morning. Because Sparx was with Fear, and that alone threw a whole bucket of complications into things.

'Sure she's coming… if she even will.'

'What makes you think she wouldn't?'

Mark said nothing, simply nodded in Lady Illusion's direction.

'An... issue, certainly. But if we leave quickly then she's certain to follow,' Lady Illusion answered, and for a moment Mark just looked at her, wondering if there was something going on here which he wasn't aware of. Then he shook his head.

'But there's more than that. I don't think Fear is too keen in the idea of us… leaving,' he said, uneasily. He touched the amulet. 'This especially. It's the biggest power source left here which doesn't belong to him.'

'He could probably keep the shield going for a long time with that thing around your neck,' Chuck nodded.

'Which is exactly why we don't want him to have it,' Mark said.

'Well just try convincing Sparx to come along, man. I mean... Fear's not gonna come. And if he won't come...'

'Sparx is her own person,' Random said, with more confidence than he usually showed in anything. 'She'll make her decision. Either she comes or she doesn't.'

'And if she doesn't come she could die waiting around here, man,' Chuck shook his head furiously. 'I'm not gonna strand for that.'

Lady Illusion coughed.

'And what if Sparx decides she doesn't want to come?' Random asked. 'And that she doens't want any of us to leave here?'

'She wouldn't hurt me, Dude,' Chuck said certainly. 'You know that.'

'Chuck that's the first thing you've said that I've been one hundred percent sure of,' Mark thought, but didn't say aloud.

Somewhere above them was the noise of something large and heavy –probably one of the very few remaining minions – limbering about the corridor. Mark tried not to think about what would happen to it after they left. Which was really kind of weird: since when did he care that much about what happened to the NPC's?

'Sooo... that's it then, right?' Chuck asked after a rather pregnant, silent pause, in which mark could hear both the endless clicking of Random's claw-joints and the faint shuffling of Lady Illusion. 'All for one and one for all and all that?'

'If you really have to sound like a mortal adventure novel, sure,' Random huffed.

'Then if we're going to get out of here,' Lady said, 'then I suggest we do it quickly. The shields have a mere few hours left before they require powering up again. I'd rather not be here when that happens.'

* * *

_Ace. _

_He was doing this. All of it. The Mining Caves--oh, he'd hated those; they'd ambushed Random there--flung into the sea, gems sucked into deep whirlpools and shattered. _

_Googler's circus. How the clown had hurt Sparx. And how the sand-filled winds flayed the skin from the minions there, how they were flung into the storm and had limbs dislocated one by one, screaming rag-dolls before they finally perished. _

_This was him. His hatred. He could do nothing about it--reaching out was destruction, as though it was all long-preordained. His screaming joined the centre. _

_The junkyard was too-distant. It would be ruined for Random's sake--the winds had passed behind and around it, uncountable times and yet again. Still the Haunted House--but she was there. He couldn't destroy that place yet. _

_Sometimes trapped in the House; sometimes alone on the islets that remained, the breaking-rock that barely stood under her. He was the wind flaying her, and he knew what she felt and hated it all for this--  
--and on the tower with Lord Fear, smashed window and the vortex with them both, black fear and hatred present for all of them. Sobbing was the sound of destruction. _

* * *

**Location**: The Haunted House Study

**Date**: 14/08/07

'I told you, she just—morphed into me! Really morphed into me!'

Totally not her day. She had a headache, and there was that thing of Ace possibly being back, and Fear just wouldn't stop it. She folded her arms over the cool cloth covering her head, trying not to listen to him and wishing it'd just stop aching.

'Yes, I did gather that,' he said absently. 'Possibly the only loophole I left. Quite clever of her to eventually realise it. If you hadn't insisted on keeping her alive, or allowed me to keep her subdued, we would hardly be in this situation.'

'What situation?'

She felt him sitting down beside her, resting a hand on the small of her back. 'Well, firstly we don't know what harm she could wreak out there. And, more pertinently, I did promise in front of all my minions that I would destroy anyone responsible.'

'So what? Change your mind.' She didn't care about this, what was the point of dating the evil overlord anyway if he couldn't do whatever he liked?

'I'm not going to kill you, of course,' he said.

'Duh.' She didn't really like the tone of his voice, though.

'But I must show that I don't tolerate treachery, don't tolerate those who permit traitors to escape—' He bit off the word sharply, swallowing it bitterly.

'Yeah, and?' she said. 'And there's the Ace thing. You gotta find if he's really around!'

'Never mind him,' he said. 'Didn't he desert you, quite some time ago? And furthermore,' he added, warming to the topic, 'that cowardly superhero's presence could hardly have been ascertained from a madwoman in a locked room. I don't even think she had a window.'

'Whatever,' she mumbled. 'You have to find out, anyway. Just in case.'

'Fine, fine,' he said. 'Patience. I suppose it's vaguely necessary.'

'Good,' she said. Fine. That was mostly sorted, then.

'It's the minion on guard who'll face the penalty in your stead,' he said, and it sounded like he was serious so she glanced up at him.

'What? But he didn't do anything either, it was all her fault!'

'As I said—I cannot afford traitors.' He stood, pacing. 'Unless you'd prefer to take his place?'

'A…spider', she thought it'd been, out there as Lady Illusion had forced her way through. 'You wouldn't let me,' she said.

He looked slightly surprised, his mouth curling a bit at the edges. 'Quite right, my dear,' he said.

* * *

**_Location_**: The Haunted House Dungeon

**_Date_**: 14/08/07.

He was rather fond of the cell.

Bars, after all, kept out as equally as they kept in, unlike a mortal prisoner he needed no sustenance, and he was free of anything trying to kill him. (Yes, he deserved it. He was more than prepared to admit it. There are always penalties for failure. Sparx had driven in the point more than…adequately. It still hurt a little to breathe. Not that he needed it.)

He felt a twinge in his right hand again, and looked down automatically at the stump. It was the cold, the phantom pains that so cruelly deceived him. He drew his cloak more tightly around himself, and rearranged the blanket Mark had been kind enough to give him. Still cold; he pushed at some of the rotting straw to cover him. Something he would have scorned in years past, but the dirt and humiliation were preferable to the alternatives, executed by Lord Fear for serving Kilobyte or devoured by the storm consuming the dimensions, and all that were appropriate for him now.

Useless. A swordsman without a right hand. Aristocrat to cripple. He drew the covers around himself again. Waiting to die, waiting for the storm to finally come to them. Waiting for Sparx to finish the job.

Perhaps affix the blame to…the mortal who created him. Yes. The mortal who made a pitiful avatar, pushed him onto a world for which he wasn't designed. Of course he had been inadequate, because of those poor circumstances, because of everything he barely remembered now. They had created him wrongly.

An excuse, of course. _Typically pathetic_. The more fool he, lying here indolent, quisling weakling in the dirt. Perhaps this itself was an indulgence, making him still further the contemptible refuse.

He cared for nothing.

'We're going now,' he heard Chuck's voice. He looked up. He should have heard the mortals passing by, but had not. He'd lost even more than he thought. 'We're going to find the source of what's blowing up the world. I've done some shielding algorithms.'

There was no reason why he should care. He didn't reply.

'And I made this.'

Something metal dropped to the ground. He didn't move towards it.

'It's the key to your cell,' Mark said. 'Kilobyte and Fear won't take you back. Or you could just stay here. But if you want to do the right thing for once, we'll be at the Carnival; what's left of it. You talked to us some time ago like we were both human. You could help us now.'

'There's nothing I can do,' he said. 'Or did you _miss_ the stump?'

'Dude, I've never been able to fight,' Chuck said. 'Didn't stop me. Your call.'

He didn't look up to see them leave, though he could hear their footsteps fade.

The cell was better. There was nothing he could do. Would do.

Nonetheless. He shuffled the key towards him with the sole of his right boot, and raised up his left hand to drop it inside. And tried not to look at the stump as he attempted to close the world around him.

* * *


	11. Loopholes and Decoys

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**

This chapter contains some input (about ten percent) by Sarah Frost (now known as Blue Inked Frost on ) – lovely change, dear, if might do say so. Reviews and concrit are as ever, appreciated.

**I'd also like to note that a new Roleplay is beginning on the Ace Lightning message board. Contact Blue Inked Frost for further details. **

* * *

Eleven: Loopholes and Decoys. 

**Location**: The Haunted House Foyer.

**Date**: 14/08/07

It was a strange turn of events.

Not that things around here hadn't been unequivocally strange to begin with. There was more to them –to all of this– than just a child's game. Lady Illusion had a feeling that if their life at this exact moment really was just some human's fantasy role-playing scenario, then even the most enthusiastic of players would have turned the console off and gone to read a book or something, as a result of the game's concept being too implausible.

Asides from being strange, it was also highly ironic. Had Sparx not chosen to bind her with that Vow – to make her swear to protect the mortals at the expense of everything but Ace Lightning, then she would not have been able to use her powers to escape from her prison. For now, their Blood Bond would serve Lady Illusion better than it would Sparx. She needed to escape and Sparx had given her a perfect excuse to do so. Lady Illusion knew she might well pay for it later on, but for now...

'I hope you're ready,' she said, knowing that they would not answer her. Knowing that none of them really were.

Mark said something: probably the only thing he could think of. 'Well... Do Right and Fear Not, then. Let's do this.'

'Quite,' Lady Illusion said. What else was there to do now, after all?

Mark looked at her and smiled. It was about as genuine a smile as anyone could possibly summon up in a situation like this – which wasn't very genuine at all – and it made her look twice.

He looked like _him_, she thinks, and only allowed this thought to distract her for the briefest of instances before turning back to face the Haunted House, standing behind them in all its gruesome splendour.

* * *

**Location**: The Nexus.

_He remembers it all. The violence inside their minds. The violence which they feel as a result of what they are: programmed, conditioned, designed by mortal hands to think and behave in certain patterns. It had been a long time since those patterns truly mattered. _

_There were once three of them in the programmed memories —_allies_, the Lightning Knights and Lord Fear and his and Lady Illusion's rivalry back then, but at least all three of them were _happy_ and things hadn't become truly bad until later._

Deceived. _Treachery turned into war. Good versus evil. Them versus Fear. That's all in the past now – a past which never truly was. But Fear is still _bad_. _

_The war--Lord Fear had started that, too. But Ace could not destroy him yet. No, for now he would settle with destroying the Junkyard. He could do that –it was broken enough, loose enough, that he could pull it away by its scrap metal seams and destroy it. He does that for Random and for all the pain the place had caused him_

_And then there is nothing left for him to feel attached to. Ace has destroyed everything towards which he can feel anything. Except for the Haunted House that is. _

'Nexus_,' he thinks. It's the first real word he's been able to think for a while now, which is fitting because it's the most important one. That is where he is now: the Nexus. The heart of the World-Not-World. The root of the Sixth Dimension itself. _

No_, he corrects himself. That isn't where he is. That is _what_ he is. There's no going back now. He couldn't stop the rain of destruction he had begun even if he had wanted to. _

_And Ace Lightning doesn't want to save the world this time. Fictional or otherwise. _

* * *

**Location**: The Haunted House Study.

**Date**: 14/08/07

Staffhead was humming to himself.

An irritating habit, comparable to the out of tune caterwauling of a Sphynix crossed with a Nevershine Zombie, but Lord Fear couldn't be bothered to comment on it at this moment. He merely stood in the window of his study, holding a single amulet fragment in one bony hand, and staring out at what remained of a putrid green and golden sky.

The Shield would require replenishing soon and he was not entirely certain that the one amulet piece he had on his person would provide enough power for him to do so. Truly, he had been holding them back –artificial or not, they still contained a vast reservoir of power. More in a single fragment than existed in a dozen zombies. Still, he has only one piece to hand and no more remaining afterwards.

_No matter_, Fear thought. The other pieces would be returned to him soon enough.

Lord Fear did not even attempt to hide a smirk when he heard them coming. They? No. Just _He_, Lord Fear realised after a moment. From the sound of it, the boy had come alone. Fear had not expected that. No doubt the others were somewhere within shouting distance, labouring under the illusion (pun _absolutely_ intended) that they might be able to provide some help should Lord Fear decide to attack.

They had forgotten. He was still the Master of this House and a denizens power is greatest in the places which they call their own. His power had not entirely faded yet. He was still greater in strength than any of them. Particularly the mortals.

He heard the boy's footsteps long before he turned around to see him standing in the doorway.

The boy flinched. Which was oddly amusing. He reacted exactly the same way as he had during their first encounter, albeit without the screaming. How long ago had that been precisely, Fear wondered? Surely it had been years. The boy, however, was still very much a boy. Still terrified witless.

Now that Lord Fear thought about it, Ace Lightning's sidekick had always been afraid.

'And thus, the Lightning Knight who thinks himself a hero finally graces us with his presence,' Lord Fear was the first to speak, naturally. He had every intention of being the _last_ to speak, also.

Mark straightened out of a flinch, wiping the alarm from his face with as much dignity as a mortal could muster. 'Sorry, Fear; no heroes here. Just me.'

'True enough. Almost a shame, though. You know, it's rather peculiar, Mortal. In many ways I have missed this kind of confrontation. What is it that you humans say: _old habits die hard_?'

'Yeah or maybe they refuse to die at all,' Mark snapped.

'Ah. Clever.' Lord Fear's tone was only partly sarcastic. 'You've been paying attention to your counterpart.'

Mark pauses. Lord Fear can see him drawing a breath. '...I'm leaving.'

'Pardon me for not being crushed.'

'I'm taking the others will me,' Mark added. 'All of them, Fear. Even Sparx, if she wants to come. We're going to go find Ace, and we need the Amulet pieces to do that.'

Lord Fear folded cracking fingers around his now oddly silent familiar. 'And the five you hold now aren't enough?'

'You know they're not. To win the game, you need all six pieces of the Amulet.'

'Ah. Indeed. But you forget yourself, boy. You also need a hero to destroy the Villain of the show,' he bowed slightly, slipping back into –what he now realised was– an old formula.

This mortal was nothing to him. A mere technicality. An interference that could be easily destroyed.

'We'll cross that bridge when we come to it,' Mark said.

'I would assume that all your bridges have been well and truly burned, brat.' Lord Fear spoke more sharply than he would've necessarily liked to. 'Along with most places in this pitiful dimension. What do you suppose? That we continue with the same charade that has been waged between us this whole time? That we continue the game?'

Mark didn't answer for a second, and when he finally did he sounded no more sure of himself than he ever had. He raised a hand, the Wrist Cannon pointing it squarely in Fear's direction. 'If continuing the game is the way to end all this then... then yeah, I guess that's exactly what I do.'

Staffhead tutted. 'Foolish boy,' he said. 'He doesn't get it, does he, m'lord?'

'No, I'm quite sure that he doesn't. He continues to treat this as a game –a glorified one, perhaps, and more involving than most of those ridiculous mortal contraptions tend to be, but a game nonetheless. '

'I wouldn't be surprised, Milord,' Staffhead chucked. 'I don't think we've ever been much more to him than that.'

'Staffhead?' the mortal said.

'What is it _now_, mortal?'

'Shut up, Staffhead.'

Staffhead did. Though he did so with an amused chuckle and another disjointed whistle which suggested that he fell silent only because it pleased him to. He had nothing more to say and no need to respond to this awkward mortal's hostility.

'I suppose we should get this over with then...' Lord Fear said, carefully shifting Staffhead from one hand to another.

'I'm not here to play games, Fear.'

'On the contrary, boy, that is exactly what you're here to do. You forget yourself: I am the Lord of this Dimension,' Lord Fear said. 'And you plan to defeat me and claim the last of the amulet pieces. The only one which you could _not_ claim through unsportsmanlike trickery, I might add. And here I was thinking Googler was the trickster amongst us.'

'Got to say, old Googler does a better job than any mortal would, Milord.' Staffhead put in. 'Shame we don't have 'im handy. Mortal's really not worth the trouble, and that insane puppeteer minion of yours always did terrify the wits out of 'im.'

'Look can we just... stop behaving as if we're reading from a videogame script for a moment?' Mark snapped.

Staffhead chucked. 'Speak fer yerself, mortal. What do you think you sound like?'

'I know you won't kill me,' Mark said, sounding less sure of himself that he perhaps might have, but still more so than Fear would've liked. 'If you did that Sparx would never forgive you.'

'Yes, it's quite possible that she would not,' Fear said. 'But setting my Angel's interests aside... why break with tradition Mortal?' Fear shrugged. 'This is, after all, a game, is it not? A game in which you are – and have always been – quite thoroughly outmatched. Quite frankly, I don't have to kill you. Merely get you out of the way. Do not delude yourself with any ideas that you are of some importance here. You're an annoyance and nothing more. Now...' he turned, holding out a hand in Mark's direction, watching, amusedly, as the mortal's hand moved automatically to a particular, amulet-shaped point on his chest. 'Set aside this foolishness and give me the amulet pieces so that I might prolong our existence here for a few hours longer.'

Mark stepped back, biting down on his bottom lip; another silly mortal gesture. Lord Fear would never understand them. Decades without flesh and blood had blinded him to the relevance of such 

habits, he supposed. He himself had no lips to bite and no lids to blink. '...That's what the shadows in the Nevershine said.'

'What, they said you was an annoyance?' Staffhead chuckled.

'No... Not exactly. They said that I was nothing. Me and Chuck. They shut up when I killed them.'

'Not that they were truly _alive _in the first place,' Fear said. 'And not that their power even remotely reflects upon my own, you understand.'

'Of course,' a smile prickled on Mark's face, though only for a second. 'I'd be a fool to think that. But I'll fight you anyway, Fear, if I have to. If that's the way you want it. But... it doesn't have to be like that.'

...Ah.

So the child was _not_ merely imitating his immortal predecessor after all. This was not something that Ace Lightning would have suggested. 'Am I right in assuming, then, that you wish to make a truce?'

'What, _again_?' Staffhead sounded somewhat disbelieving. 'Like they haven't already imprinted upon my good Lord's hospitality enough as it is? This is what we call cheek, m'lord. Pure, impudent, mortal cheek. If he thinks—'

Lord Fear raised a hand. Staffhead fell silent.

'I don't see what you've got to lose...' Mark said 'The world's eating itself from the inside, right? You can't keep this shield up forever, but if you give me the amulet piece... ' He paused, as if to see what effect these words would have on Lord Fear. They had little, but the mortal persevered anyway. '...Then we might be able to fix this.'

'And then?' Fear asked, interested in spite of himself.

The boy shrugged. In all this time he had not lowered the hand baring the wrist cannon, but now he did so, the weapon falling to his side. This was not enough to convince Fear that he wouldn't _fire_ it; of course, any idiot could raise their arm. 'The game goes on, I guess. But you know there's no worth in us staying here, and we can't stay indefinitely anyway. The world's falling apart.'

'S'been falling apart for a long time, Mortal,' Staffhead said dryly and without much humour. 'I wonder if you realised that. Why, this might all have begun the very moment you got your hands on a copy of some silly game... This catastrophe may not even be fixable from the source by now.'

'Maybe not, but trying has got to be better than staying here. We don't have many other viable options left, do we?'

'This may be true,' Lord Fear said. 'But still... you can't deny that at this moment I hold all the power that this world has to offer.'

'Yeah, which isn't all that much. You've got no use for what's left of this world and you know it. The game's no more use to anyone anymore.'

Ah, yes, Lord Fear decided. He _had_ missed this. The inevitable stalling and strafing before inevitable battle. The suspension for anticipation's sake. The one final chance at redemption which he had always –and would always– refuse, because redemption was not worth half as much as mortals seemed to believe it was. Mortal Mark may have been, but still, any enemy was better than none at all. He held the countenance of Fear's rival, if nothing else.

The child even _approached_ in the same manner as Ace Lightning. Constantly hiding behind the shields of a Lightning Knight. Never rushing. Never the one to make the first strike. '...But if you want to fight for it, then I'll fight.'

'And probably die,' Staffhead quipped.

'Maybe, but I'll do it,' Mark snapped. 'I don't have time to wait for you to make your bloody mind up about whether or not you're going to do the sensible thing for a change.'

'And I have no time for mortal children who believe they can influence a world that is far beyond their scope of understanding,' Lord Fear snapped. 'In case you are forgetting, Mark... The Lord of Fear itself makes deals with no mortals.'

'Oh, goodie,' Staffhead said. 'We can start with the blasting now, then, milord?'

'Certainly, if the mortal boy would be good enough to stand still,' Lord Fear said, and a part of him could not help thinking that this would be a highly inappropriate moment for his Angel to return. True, she was at the other side of the building right now, complaining over a morph-induced headache, but it would be very like her to put in an appearance at the most inopportune moment just for the sake of it. But what was existence without risk, anyway? He lifted Staffhead and aimed.

And then Mark lowered the Wrist Cannon again, face suddenly blank.

'Still confused, mortal?' Seemed to Fear that the boy spent most of his life in such a state. Honestly, this would all be resolved far more quickly and efficiently if they just started shooting at each other already.

'Just about one thing,' Mark said. 'There's... there's one other point I need you to explain. Something that's been puzzling me.'

Fear tutted to himself. 'Mortals. To think that your obstinacy still astounds me, even now, after so much exposure...'

Mark hesitated for a moment. 'It's just one _question_, Fear. You can tell me that, at least.'

'You make it sound as if you are somehow _owed_ an explanation, boy. By _me_, no less. I owe you nothing.'

'Tell me anyway.'

Once again, Staffhead fell disturbingly silence.

Lord Fear didn't argue and Mark took that as a cue to keep going. 'It's been around ever since this whole mess started.' He paused. 'The first war, against the Lightning Knights. Those… those 

memories that never happened in the game. The ones you have that you didn't _need._ There was a boy in them, wasn't there?'

There was silence for a moment. This was not what Lord Fear had expected. Nor did he have any particular idea how to respond to Mark's query beyond: '...Say what?'

'A boy. I know he existed, I know he was in this game once, maybe in a cut scene or something, I'm not sure. But he was there. You saw him once.'

'Did I indeed?' Fear turned to stare into the organ, refusing to look in Mark's direction. Or more accurately, just no longer concerned with him, wrist cannon or no wrist cannon. 'And how would you know that, mortal?'

'That's not important. I just know. You saw him. _And_ her… Sparx. She was looking for that boy, because someone else had asked her to. I know you met him. I know you talked to him. I need to know, Fear –who was that boy?'

'Why in the name of Zoar would I know?' Fear snapped.

'You _do_ know,' Mark interrupted. 'You were there. Don't lie to me over something this pointless.'

'If it were pointless you wouldn't be so desperate for the answer. Who this boy was… there were many boys in this dimension at the time.'

'Fear,' Mark said again, refusing to back down. 'You know who he was. Tell me.'

Mortals, Lord Fear thought impatiently, were a finicky and eternally dissatisfied species. They wandered around searching for something; they knew not what. They attached importance to objects which held no value. They placed power in words rather than in the things which truly mattered. They would go miles to avoid the subject of magic, even if it were staring them bluntly in the face, preferring instead to worry about trivialities which hardly mattered: fan clubs and videogames and children who no longer existed. For these reasons Fear supposed that there could be nothing more to this boy's question than simply idle, human curiosity.

Some random child –not truly a sentient being, even– known by his Angel before she had been called as such... why in Oblivion would Lord Fear be interested in such things?

And yet... there were memories. They mostly involved Sparx and those few instances where she had been so... ridiculously emotional that he had not quite known what to do with her and thus, had done the only thing any sensible person who did not want to be assaulted with the screeching and annoyance of an emotionally distraught red head _could_ do... Those times when she had spoken to him of the war they had fought from opposite sides, what seemed so long ago...

'Very well. This child, then...' Lord Fear said (and Staffhead tutted irritably at being raised beyond a good firing line again). 'For me to have encountered him, he would have to be located within the Nevershine Mines during the time of the civil unrest before our journey to your... to the mortal world,' he said. 'Correct?'

'Yeah, that's right,' Mark said, latching onto this revelation just as Fear had expected him to.

'Named... Tyran, I think. Yes, I'm sure. It was Tyran.'

'A boy. I presume mortal?'

'Yes. With a sister. Only she died earlier.'

'I know little about her,' Fear said. Nor did he honestly care. 'But there _was_ a child was in the mines, seeking a sister. A parent. Anyone he knew, in fact. We encountered him whilst we were making our strategic retreat across the Neverglades.'

The human stayed silent, eyes slightly wider than was probably necessary, wrist cannon by his side. Staffhead wriggled uncomfortable, seemingly debating whether letting off a shot of his own free will would be worth the repercussions of disobedience (not that Fear honestly cared if Staffhead shot the boy, but doing so without instruction was not something he would tolerate).

'He screamed of course, and bellowed and rage and quite generally acted like a precautious child. Which he was, I suppose. And a mortal one, at that. We were in the mines sharing territory with my then-Lady's spiders, who are wild and abrasive to many and often refused to obey even her commands, while hungry. And they were very hungry. To have allowed him to draw attention to us then would have been fatal. It was Googler who eliminated him. It had to be done.' Lord Fear finished, calmly. He spoke without any trace of culpability.

'You destroyed…' The mortal paused, swallowed and caught his breath. 'You killed him.'

'Of course we destroyed him you imbecile,' Fear's neck cracked and stretched, his face twisting to look at Mark head-on. 'Did you think I would risk our position because of some foolish mortal brat?'

The boy remained surprisingly unmoved by this sudden lurching action, despite how he had behaved upon first entering the room. 'So... Sparx would never have found him, then.'

'No I suppose she wouldn't,' Lord Fear went on. 'There were a great number of similar deaths taking place that cycle, though I don't suppose you could call them "deaths". I highly doubt anyone bothered to keep track. You ask me who Tyran was, mortal? He was no one. Or if he _was_ someone, then that someone was nothing more than another casualty of an artificial war. And now you know what you desired to know,' Lord Fear said, blankly. 'If we might, in mortal terms: get the living Oblivion on with it?

'It's hell where humans come from, actually,' Mark whispered, and then Lord Fear stepped back, drew inwards and primed himself for what he anticipated would be a short battle. Hopefully he wouldn't have to kill anyone and his Angel's rather curious mercies concerning these mortal brats could be appeased. Nothing much happened for several seconds. Mark raised the wrist cannon again. Staffhead was lowered into a position better for firing directly.

Mark raised his other hand.

It was this hand with which he chose to attack.

Which was, in short, a surprise. More of a surprise however was the _orb_ which crystallised on the mortal's palm, forming faster than the eye could see –and thrown no less quickly in Fear's direction. The explosion ricocheted against his bare ribs, almost but not quite slicing into marrow. His hat ended up somewhere on the other side of the room. Staffhead squawked and cursed inanely, more out of surprise than anything else.

_The Lady_! Lord Fear twisted, neck crackling as he contorted his face in every direction, trying to locate the other half of the ambush. Being smashed in the ribs by one of his onetime lady's primary attacks, however, was not something even an Overlord such as himself could shake off. Clearly, he was even disoriented enough for the mortal to get _right behind him_ in a matter of seconds.

'Blimey, Staffhead, would've thought you'd see that one coming,' someone said. Not Lady Illusion – the voice came from Lord Fear's shoulder: the voice of Mark Hollander.

The name emerged almost entirely against Lord Fear's will. '_Lightning_!'

'Nah, but kind of close,' Mark said. Fear had no time to figure out precisely where the boy's _real_ voice came from before the amulet piece was gone, snatched suddenly from his bony hand.

And Mark still stood before him –but _not_ Mark. Green skin was crawling across what had previously been mortal arms. A smile flickering in a human, yet distinctively not human face. She changed back as slowly as she clearly dared and Lord Fear had no doubt whatsoever that she enjoyed how much her presence alarmed him.

A second energy orb crystallised in her palm just as she reached her final, true form, and she paused for only as long as it took the mortal to get out from behind him before throwing it. This second burst of energy to Lord Fear's face was enough to blow Staffhead from his grip and for the familiar to screech as he hit the ground. Lord Fear caught hold of something –maybe an arm, but a crackling of electricity ripped through his nonexistent nerves and forced his hand away.

'Out, now, back to the door!' Mark yelled, and to Fear's still somewhat disoriented surprise, the onetime Lady listened.

The two of them were gone in the time it would've taken to disintegrate a Screaming Cockroach.

* * *

They ran the first few corridors back towards the Haunted House cellar. Or rather, Mark ran –Lady Illusion teleported. One moment she was behind him and the next she materialised at the end of the corridor grabbing him just in time to prevent him skidding into a wall due to his own momentum.

'You enjoyed that, mortal.'

'What, and you didn't?' Mark felt as if he wanted to laugh, but didn't quite dare. Not yet. This was still too much like one of those movies where everyone left alive thinks they've safe until the vampire dropped on them from overhead...

...And he really, really had to stop letting Chuck pick home movies, be damned if Ashley liked the vampires.

'You heard all that, I trust,' Lady Illusion muttered. 'I don't particularly want to try and repeat that damned script word for word. Honestly I didn't understand half the things you had me saying.'

'Yeah, I heard it. Every word. You were _brilliant_, Elspeth.'

'I still don't know why you felt the need to almost blow our cover for the sake of some NPC related curiosity, but... whatever,' Lady Illusion muttered, brushing imaginary dust from her shirt. 'Now can we actually get _out_ of here?'

'It'll make sense later on, I swear!' Mark said quickly, though he couldn't be entirely sure he meant it (at the moment he didn't particularly care) 'And yeah, yeah _out_ would be a good move, once we can work out which corridor leads where. We'll lead them about a bit first, this is a big building, let's see if we can confuse them some more. Any questions?'

'Yes, what in the name of Oblivion were Fear and I just talking about and why?'

'I'll explain that later too,' Mark said. Glimpsing up and down the seemingly deserted corridors, listening for any sign that Staffhead might be following as they wove between one room and the next trying to put as much distance between them and the study before attempting to teleport to the basement. 'Right now we're getting out of here.'

'And we still have no idea precisely where it is we're going,' Lady Illusion said, striding behind him with a strange kind of grace he wasn't totally used to seeing from her.

'No, we know where we're going,' Mark smiled. 'It's _getting_ there that's going to be the interesting part.'

'...Far be it for me to say this, Mark, but would you be insulted if I questioned your sanity?'

Mark forced open a doorway, showering dust everywhere as he did so. A cockroach fell at his feet and began spluttering. Mark kicked it. 'At the moment? Hell, no.'

'Good, because I'm questioning it.'

'And yet you're still coming with us,' Mark said, smiling to himself. 'You believe me, don't you? This whole thing with Ace. He's _out_ there, Lady Illusion, and now we have the amulet we can find him. We're one step closer to winning this game once and for all.' He clutched the single piece around his neck and the one in his hand. He knew he was grinning like an idiot at an utterly inappropriate moment (they _were_ still inside the Haunted House, after all) but he didn't really care. They had the amulet. The _whole_ amulet. Every damn piece of it. Right now they were immortal so far as videogame reality went. he wouldn't have felt intimidated in a live Buzzbeast jumped out right in front of them. They were getting out of here. They were going to find Ace. One way or another they were going to go home.

...And he had totally just outwitted Staffhead on his own turf. Mark wasn't sure why he felt so pleased with himself about this, (the fact that he'd wanted to get back at Staffhead every since that incident with his dad and the roof might've had something to do with it) but he did. Something was burning deep inside of him, the same pounding and excited sensation as the voices had exuded earlier.

Or maybe that was just the blood currently rushing in his ears. Yeah, it was probably something to do with that. 'Okay, we're at a distance. Think we've lead them on enough of a wild goose chase?'

'Certainly. I suggest we 'port and get on with this already.'

Mark looked at Lady Illusion. 'You know you're getting good at that. Being me, I mean.'

'I'd take that as a compliment but...'

Mark smiled as she took hold of his arm and began the teleport. 'Yeah, I know, I know. Damn Mortals'

* * *


	12. Broken World

**Yes, I know. It took me a while. But... I guess it's here. If there's anyone out there still reading this (and I can think of relatively few people who are) then I hope you aren't too annoyed with me for taking so damned long. Life has been... complicated, and you know what fandom favouritism is like. **

**We're approaching the end, now, I guess. **

* * *

Chapter Eleven: Broken World.

_**Outside the Shield. The Disintegrating Wasteland. **_

There was a lot of _yellow_ out here.

This was the first thing that Lady Illusion became aware of as her teleport spliced away and left them standing there, on a small patch of solid ground outside of the Haunted House. (_Outside_. They'd passed through the shield and were still alive. She supposed that was a good sign.) Mark let go of her arm almost the instant they reappeared, and stepped away from her.

In the store in the human dimension, where she had worked for a while, there had been a glass display in which shards of coloured crystal protruded from a field of pale sand. She had stared at it repeatedly from beneath a row of wind chimes, the changing daylight casting flickers of colour through the painted glass. She had found the light show they created distracting and uncomfortable.

If she could compare the vista before them now to anything, the closest she could have come to it would have been that display. Fragments of the world that once was were jutting out of a molasses- thick nothingness: thorny strands of what had once been Except that nothingness should _have_ no thickness, much less be the same yellow colour as the core of a sun. The fragments of world drifted like unanchored islands, or span weightlessly through the air above them. Occasionally they collided with each other in the air, shattering and dissolving at each other's touch. Capricorn trees were twisting in between the remnants of a merry go round pony with the body of a skeleton. It appeared to be floating in the yellowness before them, but somehow, she knew that there was nothing of it beneath the surface. It was not simply sinking _into_ the thick yellowness –it's becoming a _part_ of it. And then there was the air, which smelled of nothing in particular –which was wrong, she thought, it should smell of _something_ at least.

The Virus regarded the sky. His expression gave away neither his reaction to the sight before them, nor his current state of mind. The other boy, Chuck, was rubbing his hands together and hunching his shoulders, his laptop clutched in one arm. In anyone else, such a stance would be one of fear and confusion. In him, it was the closest he got to courageous. And Mark was...

Well. Mark wasn't used to anything. As usual. He was also the first of them to speak.

'...Oh, hell.'

'Not quite,' Lady Illusion said, though in truth, she thought that she could see a fraction of a statue nearby that was once a part of the gateway to White Hot Oblivion. 'Hell would be less... yellow.'

'_Your_ definition of hell, you mean,' Mark muttered, and when Lady Illusion glanced his way, he pretend not to notice.

'Dude, forget about hell, we're talking _Oblivion_ here... _Evangelion_ has _nothing_ on this crap,' Chuck muttered.

Lady Illusion blinked. 'I beg your pardon?'

'_Evangelion_, man,' Chuck swallows, his voice cracking as he tries to hold onto the subject. 'As in _Neon Genesis_? As in "that crazy Japanese stuff, where everyone turns into tang at the end"? It's a movie. Ya have to see it for yourself... Trust me, though, that _tang_ stuff is exactly what we're looking at right now.'

'I hated that movie,' Mark mutters, wrinkling his nose in disgust. 'I don't know why I let you make me watch it.'

'Just broadening your horizons, dude. Maybe it'll come in useful now, huh? How did Shinji avoid the tang, again?'

'I have no idea, Chuck, I stopped paying attention about a third of the way through.'

Lady Illusion did not even pretend to understand what they were talking about. _Mortals_...

'Oh. Well... least we're not dead already. That's a start,' Chuck said, in what he clearly thought was an optimistic tone of voice. 'And... and I think we can walk here. I mean, there's a lot more...solid ground out there than I thought there'd be.'

'_If_ it's solid ground,' Random stated, plainly. He was correct. There was no saying that the stretches of island before them were as solid as they appeared to be. Lady Illusion watched as a stone tower in the air disintegrated when it touched against an old Ferris wheel cart.

Mark said nothing for a moment. He glimpsed over his shoulder, back at the filament green wall of the shield protecting the Haunted House. There was no going back now. The shield would not allow them through; and anyhow, Lord Fear was back there... She could see the mortal taking a deep breath as he attempted to summarise the situation. Somebody had to do something. Say something. He thought it ought to be him, and perhaps he's right – it is, after all, because of him that they are out here.

She found it... unnerving, that she knew so easily what he was thinking. 'So where do we go?'

'I thought that was _your_ department,' Random muttered quietly. 'We're out here because of you. I _presumed_ you had a direction in mind.'

'Oh, great, so no pressure then.'

'Can't deny it, dude, this is _your_ joyride.' Chuck said, shrugging. 'I thought you said you _knew_ where we were going.

'It's _not_ a joyride.' Mark muttered. 'And I do know where we're going, I... I know what's _out_ there, I'm just not sure how to _get_ to it.'

'Well we should think of a way,' Random muttered. 'I'm pretty sure the platform we're standing on just decreased in width and length. We shouldn't stay here for too long.'

'To the south, perhaps,' Lady Illusion puts in. She wants to give Random no reason to change, and the faster, and less indecisive they are about things, the less of a possibility that becomes.

Mark looked at her askance. 'Yeah... that feels about right. It _is_ that way, isn't it?'

The world itself could rise up and swallow them at any moment, Lady Illusion told herself... The very air felt as if it could destroy them... and yet the boy was right: Lady Illusion could feel the pulling, deep down in the base of her spine. 'It's as good a direction as any.'

'Then that's the way we're going.' Mark said.

And so they moved.

* * *

_**The Kent Brothers Carnival, Conestoga Hills. **_

'So the way I see's it? The Boss has done a bunk on us.' The Rat picked something from between his teeth and observed his enthralled audience. Well, okay, maybe not _enthralled_ audience, but he was pretty sure they were at least _listening_ to him. Though Duff lookeds about ready to drop off, Pigface was rooting through almost-empty garbage cans, and Anvil was... muttering to himself again.

He'd been muttering to himself for quite a while now. Probably trying to remember his own name or something.

'Yeah, that's the truth... he's skedaddled back to the Sixth Dimension, an' he's left _us_ to fend 'fer ourselves here. Ain't that gratitude for ya? I told ya, guys, I told ya that Lightning Knight was gonna have a bad affect on him. Ol' Staffy knew it, I knew it, Duff here knew it, didn't ya, Duff?'

'Uh? Oh yeah, sure, sure... Yeah, crystal clear it was,' Duff, muttered without looking up from the mortal magazine he was supposed to be reading. 'Bunk, yeah... that's what he's done. Headed for the hills.'

'Right. So I think to myself about it, and I tell myself "Ratty, that ain't right. It's been four days here; four freaking days an' not a hide nor hair (metaphorically speakin' you understand) from our so called "Lord" of Fear – Phah!' He spat. 'An even if he ain't just upped sticks and abandoned us, _this_ ain't the way that your mostly-usually loyal minion types should be treated. After all those years of service? After all we sacrificed? After busting our butts for years tryin' to take out those Knights for him day after day, year after year? He just up an' _elopes_ with the freakin' _enemy_... S'just like Clarice did to Bob last week, is what it is. Tragic.'

Duff looked up from his magazine. 'Clarice? Bob? Who the heck are they?'

'Oh, they're the guys on the magic box; it's some daytime show. You wouldn't know it, Duffy; it's real high brow entertainment. Anyway what I'm sayin' is that that bag of bones doesn't _deserve_ our loyalty!'

'Yeah, and that's probably why he ain't ever gotten it.'

'Aw, pipe it down, Mortal.' Dirty Rat sniffed. 'What do your types know anyway?'

'I know you tried to overthrow the guy on at least two occasions.' Duff said dryly. 'An' you usually dragged _me_ along with ya. Say what ya like, Ratty, but unless you suddenly turn out to be great friends with Kilobyte and he starts seeming _real_ eager to follow ya, then I'm not getting involved in _any_ of your crazy schemes. I _like_ my Carnival – and my face – the way it is, an if Fear comes back and figures you've been rebelling against him again, there's gonna be trouble. .' Duff ruffled the magazine and went back to reading it.

Stupid mortals...

'You know what your problem is, Duff? You're too set in yer ways. We're free, independent beings, an' we don't like bein taken for granted. So what I thinks we should do is we start bringin' in some business around here all on our own...'

'Ohhhh no.'

'...Seein' what we can do about getting rid of that grubby old Ferris wheel and bringing in some new, top model stuff. The life of a minion ain't really for me, you know... deep down I always knew that I was a _businessman_, born to lead from the... hey, hey, get yer head _outta_ there, Piggy, I ain;t finished with that yet!'

Pigface's head withdrew from the Birdcage. Or at least, it withdrew _most_ of the way,– his snout became jammed and he ended up waving it around his head, smashing it against a nearby trashcan until it dented.

...Oh, what a remarkable and terrible army of evil _this_ gathering was, Dirty Rat thought acerbically. They were definitely suited to the business world. 'Hey, hey!Awww hell, Pigface, I ain't even finished payin' for that yet. Was you even listenin' to me?!'

'...Uh-huh. Pigface like cotton candy. There be cotton candy in big business?'

'Uh... yeah. Right. Sure. All the cotton candy ya can eat, Piggy.' Not exactly the brightest of potential employees, but damn it if they wouldn't be easy to keep happy. And anyway with Lightning and Fear and all those other little annoyances out of the way, maybe he could handle things just fine alone without the need for help of some dumb overfed hog, an under washed mortal, and an anvil head...

...Who was _still_ muttering to himself and staring off into nothing. 'Yo! Hey Anvil, what's keeping yer head in the clouds over there anyways?'

Anvil didn't answer. The huge, dense creature kept staring up into the air, as if enthralled by something no one else could see.

'Oh he's been staring off into space like that all morning,' Duff muttered, yawning. 'I figure he's real deep in thought or something.'

'Huh. Yeah. Anvil. Deep in thought. Totally gonna happen. Hey, Anvil! Wake up, ya big galoot!' Still nothing. Anvil kept staring up into the air with nary a blink and... Actually, it was kind of creepy. Anvil didn't do _deep thoughts_. Hell, Anvil barely did _conscious_ thought, and even that was on a good day, _and_ after someone had promised him the bones of a Lightning Knight to crunch on if he did as he was told.

...Of course, Anvil hadn't had anybody to beat up for a while. Maybe he was suffering from deprivation related stress, or something. Dirty Rat ran out of patience and threw a conveniently placed magazine ("Hey, I was reading that!") at the creature's head. 'Hoi! Blockhead! Over here!'

The bump on anvil's head seemed to have the desired effect. At least for a moment. Anvil shook his head, blinked several times, and turned to look at the Rat with a slow, surprised stare. He said something in a mumble too low to hear.

'What? We can't hear ya, big guy, you'll have to speak up.' Duff said, leaning closer so that he could hear what Anvil was saying. Dirty Rat leant closer too, in spite of himself.

'...Anvil hear... noises.'

'Ya hear what?' Dirty Rat backed off and looked around. 'There ain't any noises here, unless ya count the cogs whirring in this magnificent brain of mine. What d'ysa mean you hear...'

And then it happened.

The _buzzing_ started.

It was kind of like the noise the magic TV box made whenever Duff stopped dancing around with the aerial on his head. The noise of a million metafiles in flight at the same time, or a single Harpix purring in pain. It was a _nasty_ sound. A _painful_ sound. A sound that dug right into the deepest, niggling corners of Dirty Rat's brain. And before he had a chance to ask what the hell was going on, there came the static, and rushing wind and the sensation of a portal opening inside of his gut....

A few seconds later, only Duff Kent, and a couple of stray animals picking about the trash cans, breathed in the Carnival of Doom.

* * *

_**Outside the Shield. The Disintegrating Wasteland. **_

The wall split open for her smoothly and gently, and Sparx didn't even have time to look back over her shoulder and wave goodbye before the wall came down again. She had expected it to slam or something, but it didn't. The wall was just up, and then it was down again, in one fluid motion.

And now she was out here, ad Fear was in _there_.

_Damn it... I should never have left the Lightning Flash_.

But she'd _had_ to leave it, really. She knew that. Fear had told her that its power would be too unstable to fly straight out here, what with all the vagrant energies and random fragments of world drifting in the air. And anyway, the Flash was a _power source_... so if the shield ran out of energy again, and there were no more minions left to absorb, then maybe Fear could use _that_, or something...

And she hates the diea of her flash being torn into its component parts and used up for energy, but it's better than _Fear_ being torn apart and used up for energy, so...

Sparx shuddered. Of course she'd be back, and she'd bring the boys and Random (and Ace, if he was really there...) with her, long before _that_ became a problem. And then they'd find a way out of here _together_.

Right. Sure. Sparx told herself this for reassurance, and then spent another few minutes practising her breathing just the way that Chuck had shown her once, and pretending that she wasn't freaked out by the sight of the world (_it's not real, none of its real, it never was_) falling apart all around her.

There was no one there; nothing but the slimy, ugly, swarming _mess _that she figured used to be the Sixth Dimension. But there _was_ land, of a sort. Land that was sinking into itself and turning yellow and falling apart or floating in the sky too far above for her to reach, but at least it was something she could put her _feet_ on.

There was no sign of the boys.

Sparx hissed through her teeth. _Zoar damn it, they left without me! _

Left in this mess and chaos... Sparx felt the ground beneath her shudder and moved just in time, because the patch of earth-grass-whatever she had been standing on crumpled into yellow dust, then faded into mist, almost the second her feet came away from it. She staggered onto the next, larger fragment of land, feeling the previous bit sucking against the soles of her boots, dragging at her the way thick mud did in the Nevershine Tar Pits.

No Fear. No Random. No Chuck. And Certainly no Ace. She figured that this was what it was really like, to be all on your own after always feeling a part of something. After always being in a team working together for some common goal or another.

There are no more goals left for her in this tattered wreck of a world. There is only the path in front of her. Unsteady as it is. And then, deep inside of her, a strange tugging sensation behind her gut, pulling her in one direction...

Sparx drew her sword, more because she wanted it than because she expected to have to fight anything. The steady coolness of it in her hand and the occasional crackling of its power core were kind of comforting, as she walked forwards into the nothingness, trying to ignore the brightness of the yellow all around her.

Mark could be so _stupid_, sometimes...

* * *

_**The Wasteland.**_

'What was all of that about anyway, human?'

'Sorry?' He wasn't really listening to her question, too intent on working out whether the path ahead of them was going to crumble underneath his footsteps. Wherever they were, it looked as if it had once been the rooftop of a mining cavern, with tattered bits of Canary Warf clinging around the edges. He could see the remains of tall, sharp towers where the Canaries used to perch, sticking up out of the grey dirt.

'That little script you had me relaying for Lord Fear.' Lady Illusion said. 'All that talk about some boy named _Tyran_...'

They walk in silence for a few seconds. Actually, they've been walking in silence for a few _hours_ now. And that was almost the most surprising thing: the silence. The peace. Except for one or two close calls where the ground nearly turned to "tang", as Chuck called it, beneath Random's tred, their trip through the vast expanse of this disintegrating dimension had been uneventful.

'I dunno. He was some kid, that's all. Someone Sparx mentioned, from the War. I wanted to find out... what happened to him.' Mark muttered eventually. 'I thought that maybe Fear knew.'

'Ah. I see,' Lady Illusion said, though her tone suggested she didn't really "see" at all – maybe she just didn't care. 'That boy. Yes, I recall.'

'You were there.' Mark ssaid. It wasn't a question.

'Yes. Many people died. It's difficult to recall any one person in particular,' she shrugged lightly, knowing that he would not, could not, possibly understand. 'Why?'

Mark sighed. It was a tired sigh, the kind that came from deep within a person's bones. A human person, at any rate. 'I don't know, I just... I figured maybe I could do something for Sparx. Just once. After all of this mess and everything going wrong and.... I wanted to help her. Let her know what happened to him.'

'And... you thought the way to do that would be to let her know how badly she failed at one of her sworn duties, by bringing up the memory of a small boy she never found? A boy whose sister died bleeding in her arms? And that the way in which to do so, was to torment and outwit the... _creature_ whom she _claims_ to be in love with.'

'You don't have to be sarcastic about it, I _get_ that it was dumb, alright? It just... It seemed important, somehow.' He's glad that she doesn't ask exactly why he thought that, because he isn't sure he'd have an answer for her.

'It has always been personal,' Lady Illusion muttered.

'Between you and Lord Fear. I am not the only one who holds grudges. You hate him.'

Mark stops walking for a second. Which is a silly thing to do, as the ground beneath him could give way at any moment. Lady illusion reaches out a hand, takes hold of his arm, and pulls him forwards. 'I don't... _what_? What're you talking about.'

'You were never a particularly good liar,' Lady Illusion said. 'I know precisely what it was about. One last power struggle. You could simply have asked him.'

'No. He didn't want us to leave, remember? If we'd stayed there any longer he'd have... used us. Like he used all the other creatures that were inside the haunted house.' Mark kicked angrily at the ground. 'I had to show him...'

'Show him what?'

'That he should take us seriously.' Mark says, quietly, and Lady Illusion pointedly does not mention that it's difficult so ever see Lord Fear taking a boy like Mark Hollander seriously. He was an awkward, _normal_ boy. A child. And Ace Lightning had been a videogame, and Lord Fear a constant source of frustration. Something that should never have really mattered. Just a _game_.

Except that Lady Illusion knew it was more complicated than this. _She_ had been the one who fought with Fear in the Organ room, in Mark's form... She had observed Lord Fear's expressions and reactions... For all his bravado and certainty there was something about the boy that... concerned Lord Fear.

'Those memories of the war... they're unreal fabrications of a world that never truly existed, Mark.' Lady Illusion says eventually. 'You would do well to forget about them.'

'I guess...' Mark clutched the fragment of amulet around his neck.

The voices, it dawned on Mark, had been unusually silent ever since they left the Haunted House. 'So... how far do you think we've got to go, anyway?'

'Farther than it may seem, I think;' Lady Illusion tilted her head in the direction they came from. 'It may feel like far, but look behind you and you can still see the Haunted House.'

'What?' Mark looked back, and sure enough, there it was – a thing greenish shield, like a speckled coin shining roughly two miles or so away. He stifled a groan of impatience. 'You're _kidding_. It feels like we've been walking forever!'

'You humans are fragile creatures compared to the likes of us,' Lady Illusion says. 'We can't have gone much further than a couple of your human miles. It would help if we could be sure of the ground we're _standing_ on.'

As if to illustrate her point, the ground beneath them jerked, and Mark barely snatched his leg away in time as the earth beneath him turned to yellow, vicious glue so quickly that it was impossible to observe the change in progress. They stopped for several seconds, quivering, praying that nothing else gave way. When it became clear that the rest of the ground was still relatively stable, Mark started breathing again and turned back to Chuck sand Random.

'Watch out, the ground's thin there.'

'Okay. We'll go around it,' Random said; and he and Chuck looked at them simultaneously. It was only now that Mark realised he had probably interrupted some kind of conversation. He decided that he didn't want to know what that conversation was about.

_**You? **_

Oh. There it was againThe voice in his head echoed softly several times over and he pushed it back as gently as he could.

'Have you given _any_ thought as to what we'll do when we finally get there?' Lady Illusion asked, quietly enough that Chuck and Random could not hear.

'Um... No. I wasn't really thinking much beyond just getting there. Alive.'

'Understandable. But you should think about it. We're heading into the Nexxus of a disintegrating world. We ought to have a plan.'

'I don't know about that... Like you say, we don't know what to expect once we get there.' If it was really so uncertain, then what good were plans anyway? Any plan they formed could be proved utterly useless and irrelevant by the time they got there. They had no idea what to expect from the centre of the Nexxus core.

Maybe there'd be no solid ground there at all.

'Then what do you _suppose_ we'll find there?' Lady Illusion asks, sounding a little impatient.

'Ace,' Mark said, as if that were all the explanation he needed. For her, he thought perhaps it might be. His own _uncertainty_ doesn't bother him as much as it should... 'Hey, I'm just a kid; I've never been inside a world that's falling apart before.'

'Anyone who has seen the human world at its worst would probably contest that idea. Besides, you're _just a kid_ who has taken us into Oblivion base on the whims of his dreams; age is no excuse, Mark. I won't take responsibility for you.'

It wasn't a threat or a reprimand, Mark realised. The tone of Lady Illusion's voice was simply... wary. She had a right to be. She had taken a tremendous risk in coming here with him, and Mark found himself wondering exactly what it was that made her willing to take such a chance in the first place...

'I know. It's kind of my mantra, though...' Mark almost smiled at the thought as he picked his way over rocks which felt like sponge beneath his feet, as if the solidity had been sucked out of them. 'Anyway, what do _you_ have to take responsibility for?' he frowned.

Lady Illusion crossed the rubbery ground without so much as a stumble. Her face was stony. 'Well. What do you think I would tell Ace, if his sidekicks died under my protection?'

'Hey, guys, check this out!' Chuck's voice was a welcome distraction, even if he _did_ appear to be getting off track. Both Mark and Lady Illusion stopped and turned to face him. Chuck and Random's diverted route had taken them within reach of a lump of scrap metal, presumably once a part of Catastrophe Junkyard, and they were messing around in the scrap, trying to pull something out... Mark stepped back, interested in spite of himself. 'What is it?'

'A Shield of Jacob, by the looks of it,' Random said, turning a large piece of bent, warped metal over and over in his hand, slipping his good arm in and out of something that Mark figured was supposed to be the handhold of the shield. Thin pipes, like the kind you found in neon signs back on earth, but without the light within them, covered the object's surface. 'Look. It's still mostly in one piece.'

Mark stared at the tattered thing in Random's hands distastefully. 'You're kidding, right? _That_ thing? It looks like some old dustbin lid...'

'Maybe, but if the energy core still works...' Random tapped the object with his claw, turning it over and over in his hand. 'I reckon it'll take a couple of shots before giving up completely...'

'You really think so?' Chuck looked excited, turning to face Mark. 'Hey, we could use that, right? I mean we've got your cannon, and Illusion's crystal bombs, but...'

'I... don't know, Chuck, it looks a little battered.'

'Surely you aren't going to waste time with that thing while we're in the middle of an Armageddon,' Lady Illusion said, in what sounded like abject disbelief. 'How in the name of Zoar can you expect to repair that piece of scrap?'

'Well, it's a technical process,' Random muttered. 'You probably wouldn't understand.'

'Charming,' Lady Illusion said. 'Then what—'

Her sentence cut off as Random lifted the remains of the shield in the air and brought it down with a heavy _whack_ against the ground. Mark jerked, half expecting the entire platform to give way underneath them, just as it had under his foot a few moments ago. But the ground where Random and Chuck were standing was more solid, made of rock and stone; it held firm.

Chuck gulped. 'Whoa! Dude, don't _do_ that! You could've sent the platform into— oh, hey, look at that. It's working.'

Random passed the strange object, the tubes inside now glowing faintly blue, into Chuck's hands. It still looked absolutely nothing like a Shield of Jacob, but the sense of power coming from it was very familiar. Mark clenched the hand that wore the Wrist Cannon, smiling. 'Nice one, Random!'

Lady illusion regarded the cyborg for a long moment. '...Technical.'

Random smirked. 'Yeah. _Extremely_ technical.'

'So you reckon it'll take a couple of hits...?' Mark felt unsure.

'Yeah I figure, so long as you don't touch those exposed bits at the front there... especially not with any other bits of metal. They're usually insulated to keep the power from bleeding out. Though...' he looked uneasy, giving the broken shield a prod with his claw tips. '...I guess there _is_ the risk of unexpected reactions if anyone strikes those exposed parts with certain energy attacks... But if you stay behind it, it shouldn't be a problem.'

Chuck grinned. 'Hey it's better than nothing, right, I. L? Uh... Lady? You okay?'

Mark whirled to face Lady Illusion who had apparently frozen where she stood, her eyes wide. The legs of her hair decoration were standing outright, stiff and tense and her ears twitched slightly, as if hearing something none of the others were aware of. Her lip curled into a light snarl. 'I'm... not sure... something is... Wait.' She whirled around, the expression on her face changing sharply from frustrated to... not afraid. _Urgent_ was more like it. 'Get down!'

Mark was about to respond to this, when the voice in his head spoke again.

Except that it didn't speak, so much as... cried out. A sharp, sudden pain lanced through his head and down into his spine, freezing him before he could open his mouth to shout a warning – against what or why he had no idea, he only knew that the _need_ to give a warning came to him as suddenly and unexpectedly as the desire to run into the Shield around the Haunted House had a few days ago.

The wind hits almost the second Mark opened his mouth, and if it weren't for Random's claw grabbing at his shoulder, he was pretty sure he would've been torn away by the force of the winds. And they _were_ winds, Mark was sure. Winds of pure data energy slamming into them like a hurricane. He couldn't see them; all he could do was feel them and fight to stay standing as the ground around them was whipped into a storm of sand. He thought he heard Chuck yelling something, but it was lost in the torrent of the winds.

Something else screamed in his ears too – a voice. _**Fear fear fear fear stop stop stop not **_**fair**_**!**_

As it happened, it was just as well that Random had found that shield. If they hadn't had even a minor wall of shielding in front of them, the winds would've probably blown them clean into the air, and impaled them –the two humans, at least– on the sharp towers nearby.

* * *


	13. Of Truths and Fictions

**I'm really not happy with this chapter, since it's once of those "just-get-on-with-it!" Types that you quite simply have to get through before you get onto the good stuff. It also isn't as well planned out as I'd like it to be. However, concrit is still appreciated.**"_It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing." –_ Terry Pratchett

* * *

Thirteen: Of Truths and Fictions. 

_**The Nexxus Core. **_

Deep within the centre of the one-time almost-world, the Cyber Stalker watched the Sixth Dimension collapse.

It was easy now, to slip between the two worlds. Not that there was much of the Sixth Dimension left to _enter_. Not in a material sense. The energy was a different matter. As the world liquidized, crystallised, scattered, and broke into its component coding, Kilobyte saw it for what it truly was: Nothing more than series of programmed binary, messages, ciphers, and electronic signals. Pure elements which, somehow, combined to give the world its substance and power.

One of the few creations of humanity which could be considered truly remarkable... and it had been an _accident_.

And now the Sixth Dimension was dying in a whirlwind of yellow and bursting light. If "dying" was an apt descriptor for something which had never been entirely alive. It hardly mattered. The coding would remain, and he was beyond those codes now. Perhaps he had been since the beginning. He was in control of all substances, and could remake it all at his will. The Master Programmer's computer had told him everything he needed to know, and it had been such a simple matter, Kilobyte thought, to dispose of that pathetic mortal's body and then to dispose of his computer passwords.

And then he had found himself here, at the core of the world. He watched the centre, absorbing data with his tendrils and analysing. The longer he stayed within the eye of the storm, the greater his knowledge and power would become. What was happening to the game didn't matter to him, so long as he believed he could control it.

'It's an irony, isn't it, Ace?' he found himself saying with quiet humour. 'This was, after all, _your_ game, and your world. The humans created it around you, and now it closes in upon you... Strange.' He stepped forwards, towards the edge of the world where light blue earth faded away into a yellow chasm. 'There will be none alive here remaining after I take your place as the centre of this world, and remake the vortexx in my own image. How does it feel, to be a god about to destroy one's existence?'

There was no answer; but he hadn't expected one. Kilobyte smiled. It was odd how this facsimile of a body so well mimicked the one he had in the real world. Yet the differences were fairly obvious if you looked for them. Perhaps he was even more insubstantial in this world than the other... _characters_ of his ilk. He was designed to exist primarily in the real world. He had no place within the game. Not that it truly mattered. There was no more game – there was only Kilobyte and his prisoners, and the core of the world which would soon be utterly under his control.

Kilobyte walked within the core of the Vortex, looked up at its glowing centre, and smiled.

_No... Insubstantial is wrong... I am nothing but pure substance. I was created to gain power, and power I shall have. I think, therefore I am. _

_Congratulations, Master Programmer. You have been granted your Wish... _

* * *

_**The Disintegrating Wasteland.**_

The winds died as suddenly as they had started, dropping them unceremoniously on top of Random (who had been the only thing keeping any of them on the platform the whole time), and then the beast arrived.

Something _reached_ out of the clouds that followed the wind, tearing deep gauges into the ground as _something_ huge and inhuman dragged itself out of the yellowness–_Most_ of itself, anyway; it's body was ripped and torn as it dragged itself upright, bones disintegrating in a way that probably should've smelt as bad as it looked. But there was no smell at all. A tiny part of Chuck's brain (The part that was still functioning on a cognitive, non-adrenaline based level) told him that this was because the game was breaking down so rapidly, and that minor factors such as scents would be the first things to go. So even though the monster was disintegrating and dragging itself out of liquid-yellow-nothingness; rotting as a human corpse would; they couldn't _smell_ it at all.

He should probably have been grateful for that.

Funny what you notice when you're staring death in the face. And the next thing he knew Lady Illusion was 'porting directly in front of them and yelling at them to move out of the way. At which point chuck's thoughts became a lot more coherent and sensible, and along the lines of "do as she freakin' says, dude, _focus_!"

Feet which couldn't decide which creature they came from, teeth which changed from mouth to mouth on its six heads – from sharp carnivore to confused omnivore. And a body covered with a million sharp, golden eyes glistening between its metal feathers, grinding up the earth.

Concluding that he had been very, very right when he said that _Evangelion_ had nothing on this place, Chuck did the only thing any sensible person _could_ do in this kind of situation. He screamed.

Lady Illusion clamped a hand over his mouth as she dragged him away from a spot which, seconds later, was peppered by a spray of metal feathers. Spurts of yellow broke between the creature's claws where it had cracked the stone of the island through. It stood like a tower, and shuddered like a falling forest. It was like everything that had gone wrong with this world had come together at once.

It climbed upwards on its spider-ish legs (ten of them, though two had half disintegrated into yellow gloop) and snatched at the air with teeth larger than outstretched hands. Teeth which grabbed hold of Random's claw and shoved him backwards so far that he almost toppled into the nothingness.

Mark must've gotten about four shots off with the wrist cannon before the creature knocked him off his feet – not that it mattered. Mark wasn't a good aim, and even if he had been, each blast he fired reflected off of the creatures silvery scale-feathers and ricocheted around the platform. One of them caught Random on the claw, and Mark had no time to shout an apology before the ground splintered again and threatened to throw him upwards.

That was when they discovered that what the creature lacked in smell it made up for in the screech of its voice –like a thousand human beings in serious pain. It sent chills down your spine. Chuck actually saw Mark doubling up in pain – and it must've been an instinctive reaction because _he_ doubled up as , hitting the ground harder than he'd ever seen anyone do in the movies. Nearby Lady Illusion was morphing and twisting in the air, switching from one form to another as quickly as she could, in a desperate bid to find something that could fend off the monster's attacks, or maybe just to confuse it for long enough that she could come up with something more productive. _Her_ attacks were no use whatsoever. A Harpix's sting, a Canary's shock waves, a viper's venom, a Buzzbeast's bite, and her own crystalline based explosives –_everything_ she threw simply echoed back off the creature's skin.

'Aw, man, what the hell is that thing?! Is it a Harpix? I-I think I see Harpix in there!'

'Harpix?!' Mark coughed, still shaking off the shockwaves of a blast to the stomach. 'When did you ever see a HARPIX that size, Chuck?!'

'Uh... I dunno, maybe when I was using the Mimi-Me-Ace Cheat Code, but I think that was just relative sizing!'

'The _wha_... Oh never mind, just move!' Mark was dragging Chuck backwards towards the only piece of scenery that looked as if it could provide any shelter. Lady Illusion followed. Random didn't.

'It's simple, in fact,' Lady Illusion said (and Chuck had no freaking clue how she was able to sound so composed while shielding her face from falling debris). 'This creature is a combination of whatever others remain in this world. A merging of forms broken apart and put back together with... other parts, other beings. A mutation.'

' A-are you sure?' Chuck gulped. 'Cause I'm seeing... bits out there that I don't think I ever saw in the game, dude!'

'Quite sure. Part of it used to be one of my servants,' Lady Illusion scowled, and Chuck didn't dare ask if she was joking (surely not). 'It's pulled itself together out of sheer desperation to live. And it's _starving_.'

Not for the first time, Chuck wished he had something to _shoot_. Not that he could've done any damage, but it was the _principle_ of the thing... 'Uh, Yeah, I think our mission would be kinda interrupted by becoming that thing's breakfast, guys!'

A second shockwave from the creature's scream sent a number of sharp, stony towers nearby crumpling into the nothingness, dust fragments glancing off their heads and stinging their eyes. Chuck tried not to look at Random on the other side of the wall, slicing madly at the air hoping to drive the creature backwards –like pitting a human being against a ten tonne truck, Chuck thought.

'I don't think it wants us for our flesh,' Lady Illusion said. 'It wants us for our energy, just like everything in this world right now. A _dead_ body gives out no energy at all.'

'So... so not only does it have six heads, eight legs, and _knives_ for feathers, it's also gonna go _vampire_ on us the second it gets a hold of us?' Mark gulped. 'Just bloody _brilliant_.'

* * *

_**The Haunted House. **_

The fact remained: he would have let the wretched mortals go.

Not that they would have believed this. And not that they would have responded any differently if they had. In fact, Lord Fear is surprised that he had not anticipated the boy's plan. Mark would never have left without Lady Illusion. Lord Fear would not have allowed her to leave the Haunted House alive, no matter what Sparx's whim. The amulet had not even theoretically been a part of the deal. Sparx's absence had not been a part of the deal...

Clearly, somebody had been teaching the brats how to cheat.

Well.

Lord Fear knew all there was to know about _cheating_. Perhaps he might yet cheat his way out of destruction.

'_**So, Lord Fear... How is your dominion?**__'_

The voice does not disturb him, even coming out of the darkness of an otherwise empty chamber. There were those who might have been deluded into thinking otherwise, but he had no fear of the Cyber Stalker; he never had. Nor was he particularly surprised at Kilobyte's unexpected arrival. He had been bound to come skulking out of the Datastream sooner or later. Lord Fear looked around to see the origins of the voice, but there was no one to be seen.

'Oooh heck,' Staffhead murmured. Lord Fear shushed him with a finger to his lips.

'I admit, it is somewhat smaller than I had hoped.' Somewhat smaller, indeed. There remained the Haunted House, and around it, a scattering of what might have almost passed for gardens.

'_**And it's falling apart, as well,**_' Kilobyte sneered. '_**Much like its creator. How does it feel, Lord Fear? To be the despot of a broken world**_?'

Lord Fear remained still for one long moment, and as he listened, the sensation of tearing began somewhere deep down where a human gut would have been. The sensation was tied into his nerves, and he felt the structure of the shield weakening and slipping through his grasp. It would not hold for much longer, and there are no minions left to drain. No power for the shield to digest. Had the virus stayed...

...Well. He would have been useful.

'_**The foolish ramblings of a so-called Overlord. But you know nothing of control. Perhaps you did once, but the female has driven it away. She sucked the tyrant out of you, even as you drained the fire from her being. Do not bother to deny it. I watched it happen**_.'

Lord Fear 'Indeed?' 'And how, pray tell, do you know these things?'

'_**Because of the Nexxus**_.' Kilobyte spoke with the voice of a being who knew all the answers to questions which had never been asked. There was a kind of... serenity in his tone. Fear wondered how he had never noticed such a thing.

Had it even been there before? '_**I know everything there is to know, Lord Fear. And there is little left worth knowing. I see everything that Ace Lightning sees. He watched his sidekick suffer and change, his lover driven mad, his brat of a mortal eaten from the inside out, his very world reduced to nothing more than a thin back story and plastic casing. And he sees nothing more than the pain and the fear. The knowledge of this will destroy him. He acts**_...' Kilobyte laughed. '..._**Out of love for them, without knowing that they are here and that his actions will destroy them all. and then he shall die, as any mortal would**_.' He paused, as if weighing Fears opinion to this statement. '_**It's ironic, isn't it?**_'

It took Lord Fear several moments to work out what Kilobyte meant. 'Then the boy was right. Ace Lightning...'

'_**Is here.**_'

'Ah. Well, _well_ then. So. The cyber stalker seeks help from the Master of this house.' Staffhead grunted, in mock bravado. 'The cyber stalker cannot fight his own battles, even when Ace Lightnin' himself is doing all the hard work for him.'

A snort of diversion. '_**At what point did you mistake my... consideration, for acceptance, insect? I have no need for your powers, Fear. Not any longer**_. _**Noentheless**_. _**here are things that must be arranged...'**_

'What are you talking about?' Fear snapped irritably. He grew tired of these games, tired of Kilobyte and his petty frustrations tired of the whole damned game...

'_**Wery well. The battle should end as it began, should it not? I give you your comrades, Lord Fear. Do with them as you will.' **_

And then the air around him warped, dragged out to the corners of the room, walls thickening momentarily and then letting go again, as a portal opened and closes, and deposited The Dirty Rat precisely where Lord Fear was standing, and Pigface on the nearby organ.

Neither of them came out the better for this sudden arrival. Nonetheless, Lord Fear supposed he'd have little use for it anymore.

* * *

_**The Disintegrating Wasteland.**_

Sparx felt the battle before she reached it. Maybe it was something to do with all the power surges around her, but the shockwaves of pure, concentrated _weirdness_ echoed out across the sixth dimension and told her exactly where to go.

It figured. If you ever wanted to find a party that had Random Virus in it, all you had to do was follow the trail of destruction.

It was hard going fast without the Flash, and with the ground constantly shifting and melting underneath your feet. Like running on lava, and knowing not to stop for too long or else you'd be trapped there and burn to death. Sparx had never flown without the Flash, and her body was built for short, quick distances, not treks to forever. Something else that she could curse the game for.

It took five minutes before she saw Chuck. And Mark. And beyond that Lady Illusion, balls of energy crystallising in her palm. And Random looking like he was fighting thin air, but really it was just that his opponent had more legs than was fair, and could move faster than anything... And then there was the _thing_... easily ten times huger than any of them...

Sparx cursed under her breath and picked up her pace.

* * *

_**The Haunted House. **_

'So yeah uh... hey boss, can I ask a question? Why ain't we dead?'

This was not as stupid a question as it might have sounded.

Dirty Rat had his uses to Lord Fear. He had had to; otherwise there would have been no way that Fear would have tolerated his presence for so long. One of these uses was a purely _rodentian _awareness for all things wrong with the world. His ability to smell danger, as easily as one could smell the stench of Pigface on a particularly warm afternoon. 'Dark! Dark! Pigface can't see!'

...That stench was not something Lord Fear had missed.

'Aw pull yerself outta there, piggy, can't ya tell we've been abducted here? Seriously, boss, why the heck is we still here? One minute we was in the human world, all quiet like and the next...'

Lord Fear sighed impatiently. 'Funnily enough, Rodent, you are alive because I don't feel like killing you. And from the looks of it neither did Kilobyte. (He wanted them to die together, right here and now, in the place they had once called their dominion, and which was now nothing more than an empty shell, worthless and unknown.) 'It would seem a pointless exercise; destroying you would exert as much energy as I would be able to obtain from you afterwards. There would be no point, given the fate we all face anyhow.'

The Haunted House was trembling.

'Uh yeah... an' what fate is that exactly?'

'What fate do you _think_ it is, idiot? What do you _suppose_ is going on beyond these walls?'

'Anvil hears...nothing,' Anvil muttered. The creature wore a grim and anxious expression. 'Outside of the world. Is all... empty.'

There were advantages to having a brain so simple that you were basically on par with crustaceans. It meant that you were better aware of the tide. 'Quite right, my minion. The dimension is falling apart. Kilobyte has left us here to die.'

There was a moment while the minions analysed this fact. Meanwhile, there was a shrieking, bellowing laugh from overhead, accompanied by the sound of thudding. Googler was approaching, smashing into every wall as he went, no doubt doing even more damage to the Haunted House's already highly fragile structure. There came the sound of a shrieking zombie somewhere on the other side of the walls, as the shape of Anvil lumbered into the doorway, splintering the frame as he entered, looking around in awed confusion, and muttering to himself. 'Anvil... Anvil home now?'

'Indeed, my small brained minion.' Lord Fear said, dryly. 'If one could ascribe it such a name. Shame, then, that this world is eating itself apart from the inside.'

'What about Sparxy? She ain't around, is she?'Dirty Rat grimanced.

'She left.'

'Oh... oh... riiiight. Yeah, well we kinda figured... I mean, don't take it too hard ya know, boss? I mean there's plenty more fish on the sea... grains o' sand on the Cliffbeaches an' so on an so forth...'

'Dirty Rat.'

'Yeah, boss?'

'Do shut up.'

* * *

Over the last couple of years, Mark Hollander had learned a thing or two about courage.

He still sucked at actually _being_ brave, but when it came to _real_ pain and _real_ fear... well, he'd stopped complaining about the unfairness of it all and just got on with it, he supposed. And when you've been terrified for a very, very long time, it becomes comfortable; like an old pair of jeans you don't want to throw out even though they're falling apart, because it's taken you this long to work your way into them. Fear became familiar. Anxiety became common place. You found that the fear was just so normal that you could just accept it, and concentrate on other things happening around you, like girlfriends, homework, and your best friend's obsession with computer game stores.

Of course, this _did_ mean that you tended to zone out a little bit now and then, but Mark figured this was a price worth paying for even an imitation of normalcy.

This was probably why he wasn't _panicking_ right now. Probably.

'_**Pipsqueak is learning.'**_

'Be quiet,' Mark muttered.

The ground _shook_.

Mark glimpsed at Lady Illusion, clutching the rock in her fist, face twisted into an ugly grimace. 'R-Random's okay out there, right?'

'How should I know? Damn it,' she hissed. 'Nothing I can do affects this creature, I've tried every morph I know.'

Mark nodded uneasily. The creature (whatever it was) was made up of about a dozen beings that had resistance to a dozen different power types. Whatever you threw at it, it already had a resistance. The only reason Random was holding his own was because he was focussing on purely physical attacks – none of which would do enough damage to get rid of it.

'_**Fear fear fear fear fear!' **_

Mark swallowed. '...Think we could run for it?'

'Run where?' Chuck yelped.

'Maybe... maybe back to the Haunted House!' It was a stupid plan, and he knew it, but when you're this desperate you mind throws out crazy ideas and hopes you'll give them some credit.

'That's crazy, we'd never make it,' Lady Illusion snapped. You could still see it in the distance, but Mark knew this was an illusion. Perspective was all warped in here. The haunted house was far, far behind them. Farther than they could possibly run.

When he looked again, he saw that the creature was digging, tearing furiously at the ground with its limbs, pushing aside the dirt in a furious panic. Like something gone mad. 'The hell is it _doing_?'

'I-I dunno, I think it's lost it. It's ripping the ground up underneath us.' Chuck swallowed. He had his laptop open but the information on the screen was a garbled mess of uselessness. 'It'll die the second it even touches that... that gloop all over the place.'

'Which is little comfort given that it'll drag us down with it!' Lady Illusion snapped. 'How do we stop it?'

'No idea, man, the only thing that could take on that guy would be a... a power neutralising weapon, like a sword of Jacob, or something.' Chuck glimpsed at Lady Illusion, frustratedly. 'I _told you_ we should've brought Sparx.'

'And I told _you_ that she wouldn't come.' Lady Illusion winced,

And then the last wall protecting them from the onslaught collapsed, dragged down into the sinking nothing below them, and Lady Illusion had to grab Chuck's collar to keep him from being dragged down with it. Mark felt the nothing burning at his fingertips as he tore them away...

And looked up.

The monster had an awful lot of _teeth_ from this angle. And its jaws were falling downwards, wide enough to swallow Anvil whole. There was panic, welling up like it hadn't done in years, the voice inside of his nightmare was crying out in fear and rage...

And then there was the Sword of Jacob, driving through the creature's head and through its top jaw, creating a bizarre parody of an extra tooth. Its screaming made the world shudder, but it didn't fall. It jerked, and shook, and for a moment, Mark caught a glimpse of Sparx's form, being shaken violently from one side to the other before she, the sword of Jacob, and a good portion of the monsters head flew upwards and slammed into the ground nearby.

Chuck scrambled to his feet. 'Sparx, no way!'

Lady Illusion's face curled into what was almost, but not quite, a smirk. 'I stand corrected.'

* * *

'So uh... we're gonna die, right?'

It was a simple question with a complicated answer. Lord Fear remained unsure as to whether their kind deserved the terms "life and death". '_You_ might, perhaps, Rat. I however, am already dead.'

'Yeah but I m mean... not really dead, dead, ya know Like... forever. The way that humans do.'

'Humans... stop,' Pigface said, slowly, chewing on a piece of the doorframe Anvil had shattered in his entrance. 'They stop for good. Little lightning knight say that once.'

Pigface shrugged. 'Little puny knight could lie to Pigface. Pig face not have time to kill him and find out.'

Anvil seemed to consider this thought for several long moments. 'Lightning Knights not liars,' he said, eventually.

'I mean I figured... Lightning Knights, or some long, long trip to White Hot Oblivion, maybe... or heck, even that kid getting off one lucky shot with that cannon... a well placed memory spike. Anything. But not... not _nothin'_. Ain't no point in it all if it all ends up with nothin'.' Dirty Rat looked up, and for the first time ever, Lord Fear saw something in the creature's eyes which had nothing whatsoever to do with copious planning and sly deviation. 'We ain't just gonna sit here though, right, boss? I mean, if Lightnin's out there we got's to go battle the guy. All for one and one for all, like?'

Pigface snorted with laughter. 'Ratty has been listening to puny mortal's puny stories. Ratty _believes_ in all for one and one for all.'

'_Hey_! Clarice an' Bob _know stuff_ about the world that they just don't teach ya on the shopping channel, Piggy.' Dirty Rat snapped. 'Ain't I right boss? We can still win this thing, right?'

'...Perhaps so, minion.'

A lie.

Honestly, the Rat should probably have known better. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he smelt the danger far more strongly than Lord Fear has presumed, because the Rat appeared to sniff the air for one long moment, as if weighing the value in two, equally bad choices: rebellion

'Oh. Is that a voice of loyalty I hear?' Staffhead sneered disbelievingly. 'From none other than Dirty Rat himself?'

'Meh. I was much of a rebel anyway.

'Anvil will fight.' The lumbering rhino shrugged, standing upright and staggering forwards. 'Anvil will fight, and Anvil will win.'

Of course, Lord Fear thought, dryly. It was all that he had ever known. The fact that there was nothing in particular for him to aim at meant nothing. And perhaps it meant nothing to Googler neither, who suddenly was crawling out of the corner.

'Jokes that kill, tricks that torture, Googler and crew have plenty to go around,' the clown chuckled. And the puppets were strangely silent, unmoving as they considered facts that were probably beyond their master's brain. 'and no White Hot Oblivion now, mateys! Nothing can't be worse than that! Nothing can't! Googler will go bye bye forever before he goes into Oblivion again!'

...There were downsides to having an army with barely enough brain cells amongst them to boil water.

Or perhaps, this was not so much a downside at all. The world around them shuddered and spattered. The sound of Googler's laughter echoed over and over.

Still, it was a tempting thought. To go out there now... to see Ace Lightning twisted into the nothingness... to see him torn to shreds by the emotions, the so called "gift", that his one-time treacherous Lady had given him. It was a shame that he would miss it. however, if his minions could serve a purpose that had been incapable of in reality. A form as large as Anvil's broken down into energy would provide several minutes of further protection at least...

Lord Fear took one long pause while imagining these figures, to look down at his damaged leg.

...And noticed the scuff marks of Sparx's boots upon the chamber floor.

'_It's got to be me and you. No one else.' _

In the grander scheme of things, both good and evil were rather irrelevant.

There was the program. And then there were choices.

He saw no need for anything else.

Lord Fear let go of Staffhead, and allowed the creature to leave his grasp. 'Come, my loyal staff. Let us descend to the battle outside. We shall open what remains of the shield, and we shall see what it is that Lightning has to offer.'

'Uh... is that wise, M'lord? I mean, is it really wise?'

The corridor around them was barely whole now. Fragments of the nothingness were seeping in, like glazed honey dissolving everything it touched. As if the world was made of nothing more than paper.

Decades ago, before the last war, before the war before the last war, and before the game had come into being, there was a man.

This man stood in Lord Fear's memory as clear and bold as if it had been planted there. Which Lord Fear supposed it had. It was a man with high cheekbones and an ugly sneer, and a grip as tight as iron. It was a nameless being who had once controlled entire legions, and attacked the Lightning Knights on their own turf.

There had been a girl. Small, slight, with pale green skin and a face more curious than afraid, as she was pushed forwards by an eager father and made to take her future master's hand.

There had been battle, and a tower burning with the most potent types of magical energy that had ever existed. There had been a young and eager Lightning Knight, with far more power than sense, who had attacked, mixing magic with technology in a potently destructive blend. That nameless man had vanished into the blossoming light and magical destruction that Ace Lightning created.

And Lord Fear had walked out of it

This was a tale which he had never shared. Not with Sparx. Not with his loyal staff. Not with the wretched fools who stood beside him now under some thin assumption of loyalty, because there was nothing else for them to do and nowhere else to turn. They stood for a fiction. For a lie, steeped in adventurous cliché and artificial symbolism. They were fictions in his conscious mind, created to justify his means and ends.

But Sparx was not.

Still. To sit in silence and wait for Lightning to destroy them here, ih the remnants of that fictional world? No. Lord Fear would not stand for this. Failure was preferable. Failure the very moment they stepped outside of that shield and entered into the world as it was falling apart.

'No, Staffhead.' He said, continued to hobble down the corridor with his staff alongside him, slithering to keep up. 'I don't believe it's wise at all.'

Lord Fear walked into his destruction as easily as he had walked out of it.


	14. To The Storm

_"Love is giving someone the ability to destroy you, but trusting that they won't."_ – Unknown.

* * *

To The Storm. 

_**The Disintegrating Wasteland.**_

Sparx hit the ground side first, and the claw came after her, tearing into the "dirt" like a buzzbeast tearing flesh from a carcass. She felt her skin crackling as the yellow nothingness burst and galvanized besides her, and when she was upright again, the platform was a good deal smaller and more filled with holes than it had been before.

She could hear Chuck yelling her name.

'_Sorry I'm late, Chuckdude! But I can fix this now, I _promise_, I can fix this!' _

The creature struck with its teeth first—and backed away just as quickly at the sight of her outstretched hand and the pulse upgrade bursting, burning the air. It gave her a second, _just_ a second, to dodge around to grab a hold of the nearest living being, which turned out to be Mark.

'Sparx!'

She remembers things she had forgotten until now. A stone wall, a figure cornered as she leapt between him and an incoming attack. A burst of energy piercing her heart... Sparx's grip tightened on his arm almost instinctively. 'Zoar damn it, kid! I leave you alone for five damned KRYLLICYCLES—!'

Mark winced. 'Uh. Sparx? _Pulse_!'

'Oh! Oh right!' She snapped away, uncurling her fingers and feeling a jolt as human skin broke free from data coding. Except that was wrong, she told herself. It was _coded_ skin, just like hers. The humans were as much data in here as she was, able to be rewritten and reprogrammed, and she couldn't even begin trying to understand how that worked... Mark hissed, pulling away from her and clutching his arm. _Not omnipotent anymore then_, Sparx thought dryly, fighting down twin impulses to hug the kid and bash his head against the nearest rock.

Well, there were no conveniently placed rocks left. And they had more important things to deal with, such as freakzilla over there, for example.

'...But Mark what the _hell_ is that?!'

'Don't look at me!'

'I think it's a little bit of everything. And I mean _everything._' Chuck swallowed, Laptop clutched tightly beneath his arm as if it were some kind of crude shield. The creature was flickering and shaking behind them, as if gathering it's bearings in preparation to lunge for them again. Sparx watched as Random tore backwards away from the creature as fast as his tread would take him. She remembered steel and cold fire and a lightning knight being torn to shreds in a rising blaze...

Sparx shook the memory away.

_A little bit of everything_. Yeah, that sounded about right. Sparx turned around to

They couldn't get away from it. not in the time that it would take the thing to recover... not with the ground sinking and breaking up underneath them.

Lady Illusion snorted. 'Not unless that little energy drain upgrade of yours comes with an additional boost of super speed. And if you try to absorb that thing... Trust me, you don 't want to. There are venomous creatures in there, it'd probably kill you faster than the amulet would've.' she shuddered and turned, looking at Sparx. I didn't think you'd come.'

'Miracles never cease, huh? Fill me in later; help me kill this thing now!'

'I've tried!' Lady Illusion snapped, dodging a burst of yellow energy threatening to tear into her skin. 'It's not within my power!'

'And if you're thinking of beating it to death, forget it!' Random yelled. 'It doesn't take to physical attack any better than it does energy based!' Sparx cursed, watching as Random threw whatever fragments of metal he could find into the creature's face – except, oddly, for the one he had clutched tightly in his hand.

And then he was shoved, pushed backwards and downwards at the same time. The ground tore as he pulled away, data glancing from a fresh wound in his face. And nobody could be entirely certain just what had hit him, but it had burned into both his skin and the metal plating where his cheekbone should've been. Sparx winced in spite of herself.

'Whoa, dude, power drop!' Chuck started. 'Random, you okay?'

'Ngh... As okay as you can be when you've just had non-existence thrown in your face.' He lifted his hand, and underneath the metal was the The Coding. Green lines of software, dark as anything Lord Fear had ever shot at them, sharpened with purple and interwoven with sparks of blue. Sparx swallowed and forced her attention away from his face and over to his hand, to the fragmented remains of what she could now see was a shield.

...With an exposed power conduit. The academy (never happened; wasn't _real_, but be damned if it hadn't taught her some useful stuff, for a total fantasy) had told them all about what happened when you exposed raw power to _those_...

Sparx reached forwards and snatched the broken shield from Random's hand.

The creature was rising again, staggering on its remaining limbs, still tearing into the ground and threatening to charge at them like one of the trains from the Ghastly Gulch gone even more horribly wrong than they already were. A staggering lurching, yet still incredible _fast_ _moving_ freak.

Sparx hesitated. Okay, fine. So she couldn't beat this thing alone... she would have to get _smarter_, was all. She twisted the shield back and threw it, holding her breath as it struck the sinking yellow earth in fifteen feet or so in front of the _creaturemonsterthing_.

Ace would probably be proud of her aim. But the creature was moving too fast to be stopped and she only had a _second_ more...

'Mark!' Sparx reached for the mortal and found him, grabbed the arm wearing the wrist cannon, and drawing the sword of Jacob again, pointing it the same way –into the light.

'What, Sparx I ca—!'

'Just shut up, and shoot!' Sparx yelled, and to Mark's credit, he did just that; drawing in a breath at about the same time as she did, they both fired a burst of energy at the fractured shield sinking into the not-quite-quicksand. Sparx grabbed Mark's arm again, tighter this time, and hissed: 'Okay, _now_ we run!'

The nothingness exploded.

* * *

_**The Haunted House. **_

'And now we wait.'

The reaction to this statement by their Lord and Master was... anticipated. Unpopular, but anticipated. His minions were not as pathetically stupid as they often came across. They _knew_...

Still, the surprise was there for some of them. The surprise that Lord Fear was taking them into the outside world, not to destroy Ace Lightning, but simply to watch him burn at someone else's hands, or else be saved by the actions of a few extremely desperate allies. Either way it would mean little to his underlings. They were the minions. Their place was in destruction, over and over again, always returning and being killed over. The game was not theirs to win. It never had been.

A bitter tasting thought, certainly. And not one Fear was quite willing to accept. Still things were as they were, and for now he would abide.

And so they stood there, in the doorway of the Haunted House, watching as the shield protecting the structure buckled and caved, like an eggshell of light and darkness, viewed from the inside. Like something alive was hatching, rather than something dead was being destroyed. Staffhead muttered uncomfortably in a way that Fear was so accustomed to that he barely noticed, Dirty Rat was gibbering under his breath, Pigface... was simply staring, as if for the first time in his life, understanding something beyond whether you could swallow it whole or had to chew it.

The end of the Carnival of Doom, Lord Fear mused. In his earlier days, back before the complexities of the human world had begun to make their imprint upon him; before the world had changed into something else, he had thought such a day would never come. As time passed and he came slowly but surely to understand the world as it was, rather than it had been programmed to be, this certainty had changed to an almost morbid curiosity, the same strange longing that had probably urged Lightning into the heart of this storm. A paradoxical desire to watch the world destroyed.

Even then, he had not imagined it to be like this: trapped within a dark, empty game in the middle of raging yellow light, closing in around them.

Now, what precisely was he to do about it?

'Lord Fear... doesn't want to kill puny lightning knights?'Anvil sounded terribly confused. This went against just about everything that had ever been asked of him. Against everything he had ever believed. And his cognitive abilities were pretty thin in the first place...

'Of course I want to kill him, you fool.' Fear snapped. 'But it would accomplish nothing. If Kilobyte is to be believed...' (frankly, he didn't see why Kilobyte _should_ be believed, but he also failed to see the point in lying) '...Ace Lightning as you knew him no longer exists. More to the point, I do not wish to kill Sparx. By extension, Sparx does not wish for me to kill him. An unfortunate turn of circumstances, but one I must abide by, nonetheless.'

'Uh... right, right boss so... uh... What if I told ya, just a supposition, like, y'see... what if I said that she might be dead already? Torn apart by those weird storms, I mean.'

'Then I would call you a liar. Or a deluded fool, which I think is more likely. My angel can be quite... unpredictable, when she wishes to be.'

A single truth amidst lies and fear. It was appropriate.

'Uh... Yer lordship—?'

Fear hissed in annoyance. 'Be quiet, Rat.'

'Sorry, sorry,' Dirty Rat loered his voice to a whisper. 's'just uh... just...what're we doin' here anyway? I mean... look at all that mess. It's like there ain't no world left out there anymore. What're we waiting for?'

Most likely for me. a voice spoke out of the emptiness. A voice that went right through Fear's body and imprinted directly onto whatever coding made up his being.

'I had thought the world would have destroyed you by now.'

Of course. Fear had not been fooled by Kilobyte's abrupt departure. The cyber stalker wanted something from them, otherwise he would have

'This manipulation has gone far enough Kilobyte,' he muttered.

'_**For once you and I are in agreement. Very well, Fear. You have... convinced me of your wish to survive. Of your purpose.**_'

Fear snorted. 'My purpose, indeed?'

'_**I know all that you know, Fear. I exist within the program.' **_

_Liar_, Lord Fear thought, and knew that it was so. Kilobyte could not possibly know what he was thinking. Kilobyte saw only what the Vortexx allowed him to see.

Dirty Rat squirmed uncomfortably. 'Aww great. It's him, isn't it? Mister Popularity himself!'

'_**Dirty Rat. Fluent as ever. I see**_,' Kilobyte's voice seemed to rumble with laughter. _**'And you would do well to hold that tongue of yours. I have, after all, brought you here out of kindness of my heart.'**_Kilobyte's voice echoed from the nonexistent rafters of the barely-existent House.

Kindness. Fear doubted that word was in Kilobyte's vocabulary, anymore than it was in his own.

'Creepy kilobyte man has no heart...' Anvil muttered under its breath. 'No more heart than Anvil.'

Oh. Now he began to show signs of having cognitive awareness beyond "me Anvil, me smash this rock". Typical.

'Yeeeah right.' Dirty Rat snorted. 'An... And that reason is?

'_**Why the very reason you were created, of course. In order to destroy Ace Lightning**_.'

'Pardon me for bein' confused, oh so glorious cyber stalker.' Staffhead said, voice dripping with sarcasm. 'But I was of the impression that our dear Acey is doing a good enough job of destroying _himself_. _An'_ everything else, in the process.'

The Haunted House behind them creaked and curved under the strain of an entire ruined dimension pressing down upon it. '_**No. He is destroying the Gamescape and everything within it. But this whole world was built around **_**him**_**. His form shall remain, in the end, empty in the nothingness. So long as he exists, then I shall not be able to claim that power as my own. And he **_**shall**_** exist, so long as you do, Lord Fear**_.'

Lord Fear said nothing. He merely nodded slightly, and to himself. The master of the Haunted House. The villain to the protagonist. The program held little grip upon their minds now, but it still help tight to their destinies. To their _purposes_.

'_**This then is my request, Lord Fear. I will grant you your survival**_.'

'A last minute offer, if we pledge our allegiance, Kilobyte?' Fear asked, grimly amused.

'_**Nothing so blunt. I can allow you to die. I can destroy Ace Lightning myself quite easily. But I cannot guarantee the ending of this game. Only you can accomplish that. It is the very purpose of your existence. The alternative is nothingness, emptiness for all eternity. With myself, denied the power I deserve**_**. **_**I ask, then, for you to assist me**_.'

To assist him?

A ridiculous thought, Fear snarled. There was no hope of victory. And yet the words of an old programmed instinct flared within him. Destroy Ace Lightning, dissolve the loyalty of the Lightning Knights. Control the world. Kilobyte tugged on the memories as easily as he did the walls of the shield surrounding the Haunted House. 'Sparx might call this _garbage _. And I would be inclined to agree with her. Who would I be to trust in the words of the cyber stalker?'

'_**I would suggest that you reconsider, Fear. This is, after all, your final chance for survival. And your chance to destroy Ace Lightning. I have asked twice. I will not ask again**_. _**And you know what is so. You do not need me to convince you of the truth in my words.' **_

Lord Fear... chuckled. Much to the confusion of the minions. 'And yet if what you say is true, Kilobyte then you cannot destroy me, or even allow my destruction to occur. Not if you wish to claim the power within Ace Lightning. Not if I am the only one capable of... ending the game in such a way.'

'_**A fair assumption. Then make your choice, Fear. Death or glory within the game's constraints.' **_

The silence hung for several moments, before the second onslaught against the shield began. Lord Fear watched as the energy of nothing buckled against the far west tower where Lady Illusion's prison had once been. _A shame that she had left it_.

The game itself was falling apart... and everything it had once stood for was falling with it. And now, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, Lord Fear knew precisely what had to be done.

Because it was precisely what he had believed his entire life should _not_ be done.

'Very well, Kilobyte,' he said, with all the calm and callousness of his early days. With all the hatred towards Ace Lightning that he could possibly muster. 'Then you may state your terms... I must admit. Your offer sounds more appealing than oblivion.'

Kilobyte's presence... laughed. _**'Not even that anymore, Fear.' **_

'Yeah, you're tellin' me,' Dirty Rat muttered, scratching his nose and pretending to understand the conversation he had just witnessed.

'I was being metaphorical,' Fear said dryly.

'_**And I am not. This world shall close in upon itself. And now you shall trust in me to remove you from it alive. Prepare yourself**_.'

Trust?

What trust was there in the language of the cyber stalker. Nonetheless, it seemed he had little choice. And Lord Fear had already made his decision, regardless of what Th Cyber Stalker might assume.

* * *

_**The Underdimension. **_

_..._

_**Watch. **_

He watched.

'_W-what?' _

He didn't really have much say in the issue. There were images... things that Sparx had once begged him not to watch and had refused to tell anybody about. Things Lord Fear had said were so and were now being proven completely true. For a moment, Mark even thought he saw the first time they had met, mixed in with all the fire and anger. _If you're going to be my sidekick you're going to have to work on your timing. _

_**Not true? Why was it never true, don't understand...**_

The story about a boy and his dead sister. That was there too. But it was barely a glimmer, just a flicker in the background of a thousand different stories and there was too much; far too much for just a _game_. The only thing Sparx had ever told him about the War... People. Lightning falling from the sky in controlled, concentrated bursts of energy collapsing onto a town that had never really existed, killing people who had never really been born.

_**Watch**__. __**This is it. Watch**__. _

Green energy lancing upwards in a returning assault. A war. _A fiction. Just a game it isn't real and it never was this is all wrong._ Sparx, Random, burning fire and light. A game? _**It was here it started here it started...**_ Lord Fear... a man with high cheekbones, and skin so thin it was almost translucent. In a few years time it wouldn't be there anymore, eaten away by the magic he had summoned. The Knight Academy burning, structures he didn't recognize and yet had stood in a thousand times, falling to the ground.

And then the Haunted House. Sinking into green and black as the shield collapsed inwards... _that_ much was happening in the present.

'_Mark?_

'_Kid, what the... in oblivion is this?! Get _out_ of here!' _

The green turned to yellow not long after that. The memories eating and bleeding into one another, until he couldn't tell where Ace's memories ended and reality began. And Ace... Ace was _there_.

Or more appropriately, Ace was everywhere.

'_No, no, no get out get out, this isn't right stop it!' _

Looking up in time to see the shield collapsing inwards on itself, and then collapsing, like a stone block drowning in thick, green mud.

_**Watch**__._

'No, I don't want to!'

'Zoar damn it, Mark, don't be such a kid!'

Her face appeared. Angry and frustrated and maybe just a little frightened. '...Sparx?'

'Right, me. We've established that. About _three_ times now.' Sparx shook her head impatiently. 'Pull yourself _together_ already.'

'...Sorry.' Mark blinked. Still too slowly. Still in a god damned _sequence_. There were still voices and the echoes of what was going on in a thousand other places. He shook them away and staggered to his feet. '...Where are we?'

'How should I know?' Sparx muttered, getting to her feet also. The world around them wasn't yellow anymore, but blue. Or really, it was closer to purple. They weren't falling or floating, because you couldn't fall through nothingness anymore than you could stand on it, and for one horrible moment, Mark thought that maybe Sparx's actions had ripped the last stable fragment of the world apart and now they were just... nowhere.

Nowhere, however, seemed solid enough beneath their feet.

'The ground rose when you two attacked that shield and caused the power surge.' Lady illusion said, mock calmness in her voice.

'Then we went _down_...' Sparx muttered. 'I think we must've fallen into a power gap or something. Like a bubble in a glass of lightning juice.' She turned to Mark. 'What was _that_ all about, Mark?'

'...I don't know.' Mark muttered. He was only half lying.

'That... that was the Haunted House, wasn't it? I saw it. I saw it falling apart. That was...'

'Sparx—'

'I saw it, damn it, Mark! Stop lying!'

Mark looked at her. He remembered Sparx's power and his own mingling together for those few seconds. And suddenly, he recognized one of the voices in his head. 'You saw it, didn't you? Everything... everything I just saw.'

Sparx hesitated. 'Yeah. I saw it. More than _once_. You wanted me to believe you well here ya go, kid. I believe you. Or I believe _something_, anyway. Enough to drag me all the way out here and leave the Haunted House.'

He couldn't read her face. He couldn't read anything much, except for what was going on inside of his head. And he wasn't all that sure about that either. The truth of what was happening was on the tip of his tongue, but he didn't know how to form it. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, that he hadn't meant for this, that people had been dying on every side of this stupid, stupid battle for far too long, it was time to finish it, and it wasn't a _game_ anymore...

But she knew all of that anyway, didn't she? '...I didn't mean—'

'You didn't mean for him to die.' Sparx snorted; laughter, pain, and anger all at once. 'You... you never mean for much, do ya, kid? But it keeps happening anyway. Why couldn't you leave it all alone?'

'What would it have changed, Sparxy?' Lady Illusion snapped. 'Have you given up already? Would you rather die with _him_ than with your friends?'

That Sparx didn't immediately draw her sword and shove it into Lady Illusion's face was a surprise in and of itself. That she then looked at her with eyes full of fury and tears on her face was the icing. 'Shut _up_! What do you care? He's dead and you're glad about it!'

'You'll pardon me for not being overcome with sorrow. If we hadn't left the Huanted House when we did, then we'd be there right now, dying along with Fear. You _know_ this is true. I don't care whether you like me or not. I don't care what you think of me. But at least be grateful for your life.'

'Life.' Sparx laughed again. Except it wasn't laughter at all. Not really. 'You've got a funny definition of _that_ word, Freak.'

'Think therefore I am,' someone muttered, and everyone turned in Chuck's direction. he shuffled uncomfortably. 'Uh. Sorry dude. It's a... well. S'a human reference. I think therefore I exist... you know. That kind of stuff.' He looked away again, quickly diverting all of his attention to the laptop. He was hunched over on his knees and typing, struggling to make some sense out of what was mostly garbled nonsense. 'Uh... You know, as nice an analogy as that lightning juice thing was, Sparx, it's a little inaccurate. This is more like... Imagine what it must look like being inside of a computer when it crashes...'

'Then,' Lady Illusion hesitated. 'Where's Ace?'

'Can't be sure. But I think we're getting closer. We've bypassed the parts of the dimension that're collapsing and now we're just...'

'Just stuck in the middle of nowhere, Yeah. Right.' Random muttered. 'Blue everywhere, fighting junkyards and forests, and creepy, floating lightning knights. Wonderful.'

'Wait, _what_?'

Mark blinked and looked up in the direction Random was pointing. Over their heads, the world was floating in nothingness. Or whatever remained of the world. Fragments of steel and metal fencing... What appeared to be a bridge, leading from a fraction of a deep, dark forest that wasn't big enough to be a forest anymore. The two patches of world were smashing into each other and mixing together, and it really did look as if they were fighting, over the last bit of energy left in the world.

They were parts of levels that Mark recognized, though. And if it hadn't been obvious enough already, the look on Random's face (and Mark wasn't going to look at Random's face, torn through and leaking blue energy) would have confirmed it. 'Is that...'

'Yes, Mark,' Random said. 'Yes that's definitely part of the junkyard.'


	15. Villains and Alliances

**I'm actually surprised that the story has gotten this far. It's probably one of my more… ambitious projects, and of course I'm not the only writer. There are pieces of the other Roleplay players work scattered throughout this. (If you see something that looks especially good then don't assume I've had an unexpected influx of talent, it's probably one of them as opposed to me!) **

**It's getting closer towards the end now. There are still some older pieces by other writers to work into the story, and plenty of excitement to go. Here's hoping I can pull this off. **

**

* * *

**

Villains and Alliances. 

'Well, the good news is that whatever the monster back there attacked you with, it's _not_ eating any further into your software.' Chuck said, examining the data-gash in Random's face, the thin blue strands of coding woven with black. It dawned on Mark that they could see right _through_ the Cyborg's head and into the darkness that lay within. It wasn't a stream of numbers or digits, the way he'd thought it might be based on those simulations and coding changes Chuck was always running, but rather, a spider-web-like collection of constantly moving threads and tendrils, bouncing around inside of Random's brain, weaving in with the darker strands.

Mark shuddered and pushed this thought away, looking back to the sky swirling and twisting overhead.

The dimension was collapsing all around them, and yet they sat, taking a brief respite on a literal floating atoll, crafted out of chewed up "trees", buckled "vehicles", disintegrating bones and dust, like an island moving across a thrashing ocean. The remnants of the Nevershine Forest, and the Catastrophe Junkyard were being drawn, just like everything else in this place, towards the centre of the dying world. _Towards Ace_.

Mark kept reminding himself of that last bit, whenever he felt tempted to panic. They were heading towards Ace. Just by standing here, on a patch of ground that somehow wasn't vanishing beneath their feet, they got ever closer to their goal.

'You realise that we're probably walking right into some kind of trap,' Lady Illusion said calmly.

'I know.' Mark shrugged, unsure what else he could say.

'Still wherever we are seems to have turned out in our favour, man,' Chuck said. 'The land area we're on is... probably big enough to not disintegrate before we get... wherever we're going. I suppose.'

'You _suppose_,' Sparx said, dryly. 'Yeah, thanks, Chuckdude. Your confidence is totally rubbing off on me here.'

'It's this, or trying to drag ourselves across miles worth of... of whatever is left of the outside world, being sucked down like quicksand, Sparx,' Random says, dryly. 'At least wherever we are now, it isn't... sinking.'

Chuck was guessing, but since his guesses were probably worth a lot more than Mark's solid research, he said nothing. Random's face had been cleaved open in such a way that, if he were human, Mark would've been thinking of painkillers and a lot of reconstructive surgery about now, but the cyborg offered no reaction to this predicament.

'Zoar damn it,' Sparx whistled in a tone half impressed, half disgusted. 'That's gonna be one ugly scar, Random.'

Random, scowled. 'In case you don't remember, I've experienced worse. A _lot_ worse.'

'No you haven't,' Sparx quipped, 'never happened, remember? Videogame.'

'Yes, my life became a hellhole because some kids thought it would make an interesting plot twist. Thanks for reminding me.' Random grunted. A sarcastic Random, Mark thought, was a notably disturbing thing.

'Still, you're lucky that the attack hit _this_ side, there was a stronger defence, what with the metal plating and everything' Chuck said.

Random didn't look reassured. He gazed bitterly at the landscape all around them: the twisted shells of scrapped cars which had never actually been driven on roads and smashed up equipment coated in lianas.

'Out of all the places in the Sixth Dimension which could possibly have survived this long.' Random growled bitterly. 'Why'd it have to be here?'

Chuck patted Random's back reassuringly. 'Bad luck, dude, it figures.'

'I don't think it was just luck,' Mark muttered, still frowning at the "sky" above. 'I mean, how did _this_ island end up in the middle of _that_ nothingness anyway? There's no way that could've happened...'

'Unless it was forced here by something else,' Lady Illusion finished Mark's thought. 'Something –or someone– may well be trying to protect us by placing us within this bubble.'

'No prizes for guessing who.' Random muttered, and his shattered face curved into an almost smile. Mark shuddered again at seeing the program weaving and dancing inside of Random's head.

Of course right now, Random wasn't the only thing around that looked messed up. The strange island they had found themselves on was... well, to be honest, island wasn't really the correct word for it. It was as if somebody had taken a building, stripped it down and turned it inside out, then smashed it into a rolled up bundle of wood, like a small child bringing together two brightly coloured lumps of modelling clay. Mark thought he saw Cockroaches, at least the size of his hand, scrambling and staggering on half buckled legs, but they stayed silent, and there were no other signs of life.

Everything around them that wasn't being smashed up or torn apart was being warped and twisted out of shape. Like…

…Well, like something being sucked into a portal. In fact, the only noticeable difference between this place and the outside was that fact that they weren't sinking _into_ anything. There was nothing for them to sink into.

'My guess,' Chuck said, 'is that we're currently floating around _beneath_ the superficial visuals of the game itself. We've sunk right down to the coding level. We've slipped through the cracks in the game and into the programming. This is where all the ones-and-zeroes happen. Where the game is put together.'

'In other words, we're floating through our world's metaphorical bone marrow?' Lady Illusion suggested dryly, sounding strangely calm about the whole thing.

'Uh,' Chuck gulped; Mark didn't blame him; that had to be the yuckiest allusion he'd ever heard. 'Well, I was gonna say it's more like we're stuck inside the brain of the world, but your way works too.' Chuck said, stepping away from Random and carefully closing his practically useless laptop. 'So, now what?'

He didn't really indicate who he was directing the question at, so it was a few moments before anybody spoke. 'I guess we keep going,' Sparx muttered, 'or rather, keep letting our bubble here _take us_ wherever it's going. Like I didn't feel manipulated enough as it is.'

'We have no way of knowing if it's going where we _wish it_ to go,' Lady Illusion glared in frustration at the nothingness of blue-almost-purple around them.

'The way the wind's blowing?' Chuck suggested.

'We're inside of a videogame, Chuckdude,' Sparx sighed impatiently. 'There isn't any wind.'

Chuck shrugged. 'No... But there's an energy flow. You can feel it pushing us along. We're going _somewhere_ that's for sure.'

The next thing Mark heard nearly shocked him into a stupor. Mostly because... well, it wasn't anything he'd expected to hear _ever_ again, and that he was hearing it here and now was neither logical nor desired. It was a shrill smattering of laughter which could only belong to one person.

'Oh god,' Chuck muttered under his breath. 'Dude, please tell me that when I turn around, I'm not gonna see who I think I am.'

'He's right, ya know, kiddies. You _are_ goin' somewhere. Reckon we'll be comin' along.'

Lady Illusion snarled, turning abruptly, the crystal projectile forming in her hands before Mark had time to think. There was a burning sensation as the explosive swept past his ear and collided with the huge figure skulking in the shadows. Energy spat and bled all around them and mark frowned as the light of Lady Illusions attack broke and shattered into pieces. Like glass. That… Didn't usually happen when she attacked.

Then there was a familiar guttural roar. 'Heeey that hurt Anvil!'

'Dude, what the hell?' Chuck gasped, and Mark wished he had an answer for him, he really did. But there was nothing that could explain this: Anvil, Dirty Rat, a scrambling, rattling noise nearby that sounded very much like Pigface with his head buried in a trash can again.

_Oh no, here we go again_...

But when Anvil's form skulked out of the darkness, Mark felt himself shudder.

It's Anvil alright. Or… it's _mostly_ Anvil, yet he seemed less imposing, somehow. Less huge. His thin face was mostly teeth and eyes. There were fragments of his body torn out and replaced with the transparent rivulets of coding they could see shining through Random's face. _**Looks the same, exactly the same**_. He could see the smouldering bubbling "flesh" where Lady Illusion's attack must have impacted against Anvil's shoulder, and if he squinted hard enough he could see a mesh of insect-like ones and zeros curdling within Anvil's body. The Rat was the same, body flaking away like a zombie, peeling to reveal the cells beneath, eyes red. Their forms were fizzing and crackling as he had seen Ace and Sparx do so many times before.

In short, it was all pretty gruesome. Mark deliberately didn't look at Pigface. He didn't want to know what he'd see.

Even Lady Illusion seemed to hesitate, rising slightly from her protective stance, shifting back and forth. 'What happened to you?' she asked. 'How did you get here?'

'Anvil gave his power to Lord Fear.' Anvil said, sounding torn between proud, terrified, acceptance, and a number of other feelings Mark had never thought Anvil smart enough to comprehend. 'Lord Fear is there now, with the Storm. Googler with him too. Googler be there when world falls and burns, when world comes back again as his. Lord Fear is strong. Lord Fear will remake Sixth Dimension in his own image.'

Well, _that_ made sense. _In his own image_, Mark thought uneasily. Those didn't sound like Anvil's words. They sounded borrowed from someone else. They shouldn't have been here, he realised. They should've been back on earth, in the Kent Brother's carnival, wreaking havoc in Conestoga Hills. Or at very least they shouldn't have been _here_ specifically, in this bubble drifting beneath everything.

_**And yet here they are, right here right here**_.

_Yep. Right here_. Bodies falling apart and crumbling, coding held together by tatters and fragments. Their entire world sinking into the gold murkiness.

Amazingly enough, Mark couldn't help but feel a little sorry for them.

'Wait, hold it,' Sparx snaps, breaking the moment, and Mark can hear the strained hope in her voice. 'Fear's _alive_?'

Pigface laughs deeply, his ugly voice straining and crackling at the edges. 'Lord and Master never alive, silly Lightning Knight Angel person! Lord Fear dead and deathness. Lord Fear is death of world!'

'He's talking gibberish,' Random mutters.

'Yeah, heh, an' you'd be familiar with that wouldn't ya, robot butt?' The Rat chuckled maniacally. 'You know aaaaaall about gibberish; what with all that messed up scrambled garbage buzzing about inside of ya head. Lord Fear knows what he's doing. And we're gonna be there to see it all go down.'

'I… I don't think that's such a good idea, man.' Chuck said slowly, and was clearly surprised at himself for sounding so close to composed and controlled when he felt about this close to throwing up with terror.

'Pigface not care what puny mortals think!' Pigface grunted. 'Pigface and Anvil do what they want.'

'Oh, and this is what you want, is it?' Mark snaps. 'For the world to be… swallowed up and spat back out again as… as whatever it's going to be spat back out as? We'll all be dead by the time Ace is finished with us!'

Then Mark jumps and clamps a hand over his mouth, realising just a little too late what he has said. What he has admitted to the minions, but Anvil merely sneers with an expression so much crueller than anything Mark has ever seen from him before.

'Oh come on, squirt, this is crazy! You really think Ace is the one destroying everything? _Ace Lightning_? You're all a bunch of terminal brains! And I don't even Zoar freaking know what _you're_ talking about anymore!' Sparx glared at Mark temporarily. 'I mean, maybe he's got something to do with this, sure, it's _his game_, but how can you think he's the cause of the world falling apart? Did messing with that amulet scramble your brain, or something?'

'I dunno. Probably. And you still _followed_ me, didn't you?' Mark muttered, and then realised this was completely the wrong thing to say.

'Because that's what Ace would want,' Sparx snapped. 'He wouldn't let any of you be hurt, Mark. You can see that, can't you? That's not _Ace… _this… _this_ isn't Ace.'

'Oh, what so Lady Illusion can chance and Ace can't?' Mark snapped. 'For god's sakes, Sparx, get your priorities sorted!'

'Says the kid who can't seem to decide whether we're going to rescue Ace or stop him or… I don't know _what_ you want. Maybe if you explained to us a little better!'

'Uh, guys—'Chuck started to interrupt but was silenced by a glare from Sparx.

'I don't _want_ Ace to get hurt, Sparx!' Mark snapped.

'And you think I do?' Sparx snapped. 'I never wanted this; I never wanted _any_ of this.'

The burgeoning argument was interrupted by a loud, irritated cough from the Rat. 'Well, well… what is this, eh, kiddies, trouble in paradise? And here I was thinkin' you and Fear had this kinda freakish bond thing goin',' the Rat mimed throwing up. This looked even more disturbing what with the fact that there were gaping holes in his chest. 'Ya know his Lordship doesn't take too kindly to turncoats. He mades that explicitly clear.'

That's not what I meant you blunder brain!' Sparx started to snap… then she cut herself off. Pausing. A faint smile curled around her lips. 'Sucking up to him in your dying days, rat? You're beginning to sound like Staffhead.'

Sparx smirked, sword of Jacob held out in front of her, stance relaxed, and Mark frowned, wondering what she could be thinking. She stood halfway between Mark and Chuck, looking very much like a sentinel. Like an image carved out in sketchbooks by traditionally minded artists, pencil lines carved in clay, then carved in plastic, then taken apart piece by piece, put back together out of coding and digital colours, stories crafted around her, histories, traditions, dreams, hopes, wishes, _**look**__..._

Mark shook his head sharply, trying to separate the voice's thoughts for him own.

'...But I guess even _you_ don't speak ill of the dead. Or erased. Or disintegrated. Or whatever.' Sparx was saying as Mark pulled himself back to the moment. 'Why should I believe a word you're saying?'

Rat paused for a moment as if working out what Sparx implied. Then he snorted, snatches of black and blue coding drifted out between his stubby teeth. 'Heh, that's funny. She thinks we're lyin', Piggy. Thinks our lordship ain't really here anymore.'

'How could he be?' Sparx snapped. 'I saw the Haunted House fall apart, I barely got out in time.'

'Stupid stupid Lightning Knights, stupid, stupid humans, working on Lightning Knights brains,' Anvil garbled, lunging forwards several steps. 'Will not stop Lord Fear. Anvil will crush you first.'

Then he was raising his anvil fist high in the air, bringing it down to slam the ground in front of him. Mark winced, expecting the ground to buckle in wards and the air to tremble. Neither of these things happened. Anvil's hammer hit the ground with all the force of a pillow hitting sand. A few dust particles spread, but that was it. Anvil growled deep and low and lifted the anvil again, pushing confusedly at the sand with it, rumbling in frustration.

'Wow,' Random said, dryly. 'Frankly I'm quivering in repressed terror. Weakling.'

'Anvil not weakling!' Anvil screamed. 'Anvil destroy puny lightning Knights, Anvil—

'Aw, pipe down, ya big galoot,' Dirty Rat said. Except his voice was softer now. Lacking the snide smugness of before. He sounded almost tired. 'Ya just ain't got it in ya anymore. We gave it all to Fear.'

'And what is Lord Fear going to do with this impressive reserve of power?' Lady Illusion asked.

Dirty Rat looked at her firmly, and for one long second mark could've thought something a bit like understanding passed between them. As if there was something they both understood in all this. Maybe because they'd both been minions… 'Ain't it obvious, black widow gal? He's gonna do what he was supposed to do from the start. He's gonna destroy Ace Lightning.' 


End file.
